Puppet MastersS


Jet4

Escalation in Idlib: Turkey confirms it downed Syrian fighter jet


RT
Tue, 03 Mar 2020 09:55 UTC
Aero L-39 Albatros
© AFP/Louai BesharaA Czech-made Aero L-39 Albatros Syrian military aircraft
A Syrian warplane has been shot down over Idlib by Turkey while carrying out anti-terrorism operations, according to Syrian state media. The incident comes amid a growing conflict between Syrian and Turkish forces in the region.

Turkey's defense ministry said in a tweet that its forces shot down a Syrian L-39 warplane. According to the Syrian state news agency SANA, the jet was targeted while carrying out anti-terrorism operations in the area.

In an additional social media post, the Turkish military said its operation in Idlib was progressing "successfully," claiming that it had destroyed several tanks, howitzers and other military hardware in the last 24 hours. The defense ministry added that it had "neutralized" 327 Syrian troops.

Comment: See also:

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Putin

Putin on Russia's foreign agents law: 'Register and keep working, it discourages meddling, infringes no one'


RT
Tue, 03 Mar 2020 08:30 UTC
putin
© Reuters/Kevin LamarqueRussian President Vladimir Putin
Russia's 'foreign agents' law - subjected to constant bashing in Western media - is much milder than its US counterpart, as it only applies to those meddling in local politics while on outside pay, Vladimir Putin explained.

"What's wrong with the foreign agent status? We're not the ones who came up with it," the Russian leader pointed out during the latest episode of the TASS news agency's series '20 Questions to Vladimir Putin'. "Seriously, was it us who invented the foreign agent status? This law has been in effect in the US since 1937 or 1938 and it still is," he said.

The legislation in question, the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) requires that organizations advocating interests of foreign powers disclose their relationship with a foreign government. These entities should also register with the Justice Department as 'foreign agents'.

Referring to Maria Butina, who spent months in solitary confinement for failing to register as a foreign agent on US soil, Putin said:
"One such incident occurred just recently. A citizen of ours, a rather well-known young lady, was jailed as a foreign agent. And pardon me, but she was faced with 12 years, right? So? They use it. We have no such thing. We only have an administrative penalty for this."
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Pistol

Idlib: US willing to give Turkey ammo in support of Ankara's standoff with Syrian army


RT
Tue, 03 Mar 2020 16:43 UTC
Turktank
© Reuters/Stoyan Nanov
Washington is ready to supply NATO ally Turkey with ammunition amid mounting tensions in Idlib, where Ankara is in an open conflict with Syrian government forces.

The promise was made by US Special Representative for Syria James Jeffrey, who visited Turkey's border province of Hatay on Tuesday.
"Turkey is a NATO ally and mostly uses US-made military hardware. We're willing to provide - for example, the President [Donald Trump] mentioned this - ammunition. [The US] will make sure that that equipment is ready. As a NATO partner we share information intelligence... and we are going to ensure that they have what they need there."
According to the representative, Ankara's plea for humanitarian assistance was also heard in Washington.

Separately on Tuesday, the US State Department announced that it will give $108 million of additional humanitarian assistance to the people in northern Syria.

Comment: Turkey has become a master at rotating alliances to serve its agenda, but in the long run, will this fickle flip-trick pay off?

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Snakes in Suits

Calls for UK Home Sec Priti Patel to step down over multiple bullying allegations

Ashley Cowburn
The Independent
Tue, 03 Mar 2020 18:22 UTC
Priti Patel
© PAHome secretary Priti Patel leaves the Home Office in London on Monday 2 March
Labour's Diane Abbott has called on Priti Patel to step down as home secretary while the Cabinet Office conducts an inquiry into bullying allegations levelled against her.

The shadow home secretary made the comments after Boris Johnson was forced to launch an investigation in the wake of the explosive resignation of the top civil servant at the Home Office.

It also emerged on Monday that a former aide to Ms Patel received a £25,000 payout after allegedly being bullied in 2015 by the minister. The BBC said it had seen legal correspondence claiming the woman had taken an overdose following the incident, when Ms Patel was a employment minister.

Comment: See also: UK Home Sec Priti Patel accused of "vicious" bullying campaign against top civil servant

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Biohazard

The Pentagon's myth of moderate nuclear war

Brian Cloughley
Strategic Culture Foundation
Tue, 03 Mar 2020 00:00 UTC
nuclear war
There are many influential supporters of nuclear war, and some of these contend that the use of 'low-yield' and/or short-range weapons is practicable without the possibility of escalation to all-out Armageddon. In a way their argument is comparable to that of the band of starry-eyed optimists who thought, apparently seriously, that there could be such a beast as a 'moderate rebel'.

In October 2013 the Washington Post reported that "The CIA is expanding a clandestine effort to train opposition fighters in Syria amid concern that moderate, US-backed militias are rapidly losing ground in the country's civil war," and the US Congress gave approval to then President Barack Obama's plan for training and arming moderate Syrian rebels to fight against Islamic State extremists. The belief that there could be any grouping of insurgents that could be described as "moderate rebels" is bizarre and it would be fascinating to know how Washington's planners classify such people. It obviously didn't dawn on them that any person who uses weapons illegally in a rebellion could not be defined as being moderate. And how moderate is moderate? Perhaps a moderate rebel could be equipped with US weapons that kill only extremists? Or are they allowed to kill only five children a month? The entire notion was absurd, and predictably the scheme collapsed, after expenditure of vast amounts of US taxpayers' money.

Comment: There exists a legitimately, truly, and incontrovertibly crazy cadre of government personnel who exist in the bowels of the Pentagon and elsewhere - whose skewed and psychopathic rationals threaten the lives and well being of literally half the planet.

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Black Cat

Vulture capitalist and Republican mega-donor Paul Singer buys stake in Twitter and seeks to oust Jack Dorsey

Martin Pengelly
The Guardian
Sat, 29 Feb 2020 10:13 UTC
Paul Singer
Paul Singer
Billionaire Paul Singer's Elliott Management has taken a 'sizable stake' and intends to 'push for changes', reports Bloomberg News

A major Republican donor has purchased a stake in Twitter and is reportedly seeking to oust its chief executive, Jack Dorsey.

Bloomberg News first reported that Elliott Management has taken a "sizable stake" and "and plans to push for changes at the social media company, including replacing Dorsey".

Paul Singer, the billionaire founder of Elliott Management, is a Republican mega-donor who opposed Donald Trump during the real-estate magnate's run for the presidential nomination but has since come onside.

After a White House visit in February 2017, Trump said Singer "was very much involved with the anti-Trump or, as they say, 'Never Trump', and Paul just left, and he's given us his total support and it's all about unification".

Comment: Whenever a creature like Paul Singer gains more influence on a social media company like Twitter, chances are the signal to noise ratio regarding good information is likely to be further degraded.

See also: How and why neocon billionaire Paul Singer Is driving the outsourcing of US tech jobs to Israel

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Control Panel

Bill Browder points finger at Bernie Sanders on Magnitsky Act vote, but the real story is his own corruption

Danielle Ryan
RT
Mon, 02 Mar 2020 19:43 UTC
Browder Sanders
© (L) AFP / Daniel Leal-Olivas, (R) Reuters / Jonathan Ernst
UK investor Bill Browder has jumped aboard the anti-Bernie Sanders train, smearing the 2020 frontrunner as a Russian pawn for a 2012 vote on the Magnitsky Act, which he championed. Unsurprisingly, there's a lot more to the story.

To understand the motivation behind Browder's finger-pointing at Sanders, one needs to do a little reading into Browder's own background — beyond the glowing praise that can be found in pages of Western media.

The American-born banker who heads the Hermitage Capital Management investment fund (and renounced his US citizenship to avoid paying taxes) made his fortune in 1990's Russia. When things were going well for him, he was decidedly pro-Putin, praising the Russian president in a 2004 op-ed for "fighting to stop the oligarchs from taking over the country."


Comment: Browder is a mega-conman who deserves a mega comeuppance for all the political and social Russophobia he's stirred up in the interest of maintaining his business, influence and lifestyle.

See also:

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Bug

Trump and the politics of Coronavirus

Mike Luongo
Gold, Goats 'N Guns
Fri, 28 Feb 2020 00:00 UTC
Trump Coronavirus
Normally I agree with Moon of Alabama's analysis on foreign affairs and certainly geopolitics. But the latest post discussing the political fallout from spread and potential mismanagement of nCOVID-19 is nothing short of fantasy.

I don't disagree that China, assuming that the numbers they've published are any more real than a lot of their economic numbers, has shown remarkable power to stop the spread of the disease.

And they have done so so as to disrupt supply chains all across the world. This week the equity markets finally came to terms with the real world effects of such a disruption, even if the disease itself is, in the end, controllable and the response to it to this point, overblown.

I'm not saying it is one way or the other. I've heard every conspiracy theory about this virus you can imagine. It speaks directly to the power of rumor and the ability for people absent good information to make up stories that fit their personal bias.

And in this post B. betrays his in a way that, frankly, highlights just how little he understands America, its culture and the electorate.
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Bizarro Earth

US aircraft carrier & warships enter Mediterranean


Sputnik
Sun, 01 Mar 2020 12:05 UTC
aircraft carrier sputnik
© Sputnik/ US Navy // Miguel A. Contreras Contreras
The Mediterranean Sea area is home to two major conflicts - a full-blown civil war in Libya (which turned into a failed state in 2011 following NATO airstrikes) and tensions in Syria between Damascus and Washington's Turkish allies.

The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower crossed through the Strait of Gibraltar and entered the Mediterranean Sea on Saturday night, the Marine Traffic maritime information portal has reported.

According to the resource, the aircraft carrier, going by the call sign NIKE, is currently sailing east of Gibraltar as of Sunday afternoon.

The ship reportedly has an escort of several other US Navy warships, including the USS San Jacinto and USS Vella Gulf Tomahawk-armed guided-missile cruisers, as well as a destroyer squadron consisting of the USS Stout, USS James E. Williams and USS Truxton destroyers.

Comment: See also:

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Magnify

Buttigieg's exit a sign Dems trying to stop Sanders - Trump

Frank Miles
Fox News
Tue, 03 Mar 2020 12:13 UTC
Buttigieg
© REUTERS/Brian SnyderDemocratic 2020 U.S. presidential candidate former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg joins the Annual Bloody Sunday March across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, U.S., March 1, 2020.
Pete Buttigieg suspends 2020 campaign following fourth place finish in South Carolina primary.

Moments after former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg told supporters he's ending his presidential campaign Sunday, President Trump said it reflected the growing pressure among more moderate Democrats to consolidate in order to blunt the rise of progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

Trump tweeted: "Pete Buttigieg is OUT. All of his SuperTuesday votes will to Sleepy Joe Biden. Great timing. This is the REAL beginning of the Dems taking Bernie out of play - NO NOMINATION, AGAIN!"

Buttigieg previously had said Sanders was too liberal to be elected.

Comment: RT reports:
Buttigieg, the youngest on the Democratic candidate roster, called it quits after finishing a respectable fourth in the South Carolina primary on Saturday, where he was surpassed only by former VP Joe Biden, current Democratic race frontrunner Bernie Sanders, and billionaire activist Tom Steyer, who himself bowed out shortly after the results came in.

"After a year of going everywhere, meeting everyone, defying every expectation, seeking every vote — the truth is that the path has narrowed to a close for our candidacy, if not for our cause," Buttigieg said, announcing his decision to pull the plug on his campaign at a rally in his hometown of South Bend on Sunday night.

Buttigieg rather unexpectedly took center stage in the nomination process early on after he stunned observers, edging out Sanders in the Iowa caucus on February 3.

Buttigieg's withdrawal from the race could give a boost to Biden's chances of swaying the nomination process in his favor, cutting short the leadership of Sanders who, despite the former VP's landslide victory in South Carolina, is still leading by eight delegates overall after winning New Hampshire, Nevada and the popular vote in Iowa.


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