On Thursday 10^th May 2018, an unprecedented exchange of strikes happened between Israel and Syria. The mainstream media, as well as some "alternative" media like Russia Today, were quick to relay the Israeli army version, according to which the Zionist entity "retaliated" against an "Iranian attack by Revolutionary Guards' Al-Quds Force" consisting of "twenty rockets" fired at Israeli positions in the occupied Golan, four of which were "intercepted by the Iron Dome" and the others "crashed into Syrian territory", no damage being recorded in Israel. Israel has reportedly responded to this unprecedented "act of aggression" with a "large-scale operation" that destroyed "the entire Iranian infrastructure in Syria", in order to deter the Islamic Republic from any stray impulse of conducting future strikes.

This narrative takes for granted the postulates, data and myths of the Zionist entity's propaganda - which imposes permanent military censorship on the Israeli media, exposing any offender to a prison sentence. And, reading the international media, one might get the impression that, like American economic sanctions, this censorship is extraterritorial. In any event, the narrative cannot withstand scrutiny.

The Bureau of Investigation was founded in 1908 by a man named Charles Joseph Bonaparte, the great nephew of Napoleon. It remained a relatively marginal slice of the US Department of Justice until an ambitious sociopath named J Edgar Hoover rode a Red Scare panic to the top of the law enforcement food chain and used blackmail and illegal wiretapping to exponentially expand its size, scope and power under its new name, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Hoover ruled over America with an iron fist for nearly five decades as the head of the FBI. He bullied, blackmailed and crushed anyone who stood in between him and his insatiable drive to acquire more power, eventually forming the frequently Constitution-violating Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) in the 1950s.

COINTELPRO was used to infiltrate and undermine any activist groups Hoover personally disliked under the pretense of protecting the nation from violence, targeting everyone from feminist groups to antiwar activists.

Militaristic fantasies were unleashed on The Telegraph's op-ed pages this week, when a piece asked: 'What would a 21st century British coup look like? And what would a Corbyn government have to do to survive it?'
Throwing partisanship out the window, The Telegraph published an opinion piece written by Paul Carter, a political commentator who is writing a book about Harold Wilson and Louis Mountbatten. He wondered if the near-coup led by Earl Mountbatten of Burma could happen in modern times. "Only one week after Jeremy Corbyn's election as Labour leader, a serving general of the army warned of a direct and public challenge if a future Prime Minister Corbyn jeopardised the country's security: 'The army wouldn't stand for it... people would use whatever means possible, fair or foul to prevent that,'" Carter wrote.

"The idea of a military coup against an elected Prime Minister Corbyn may seem fanciful. Yet, 50 years ago this week, this almost happened to Harold Wilson, a prime minister regarded by many as left-wing and anti-establishment, who had also been accused of consorting with communist spies."

Rakem Balogun thought he was dreaming when armed agents in tactical gear stormed his apartment. Startled awake by a large crash and officers screaming commands, he soon realized his nightmare was real, and he and his 15-year-old son were forced outside of their Dallas home, wearing only underwear.

Handcuffed and shaking in the cold wind, Balogun thought a misunderstanding must have led the FBI to his door on 12 December 2017. The father of three said he was shocked to later learn that agents investigating "domestic terrorism" had been monitoring him for years and were arresting him that day in part because of his Facebook posts criticizing police.

"It's tyranny at its finest," said Balogun, 34. "I have not been doing anything illegal for them to have surveillance on me. I have not hurt anyone or threatened anyone."

Probably the weirdest, dumbest, most annoying thing about writing on US foreign policy right now is the fact that regime change in Iran and regime change in Syria have been falsely spun into the illusion of two separate issues along partisan lines. People who are more aligned with America's Democratic Party are a lot more opposed to the overthrow of the Iranian government and a lot more sympathetic to the idea of getting rid of Assad, and with those who are more aligned with the Republican party it's the exact opposite.

Partisan politics turn people into such drooling idiots. Democratic Party-aligned Americans oppose Trump's withdrawal from the Iran deal because it was Obama's baby, while Republican-aligned Americans support it for the exact same reason. This is a deliberate provocation designed to enable crushing economic sanctions, which the US-centralized war machine always uses as a prelude to war, to weaken and destabilize the nation. Plan A will be for imperial intelligence agencies to stage a coup or fund a violent uprising in order to either throw Iran into impotent chaos or replace its government with a puppet regime (either one satisfies Plan A). Plan B will be something more direct.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Thursday that Europe can no longer count on the United States to protect it, urging the continent to "take destiny into its own hands."

"It is no longer such that the United States simply protects us, but Europe must take its destiny in its own hands. That's the task of the future," she said during a speech honoring French President Emmanuel Macron, according to Agence France-Presse.

Her sharp comments came days after President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear deal, angering European allies who are parties to the 2015 pact.

Macron echoed Merkel, saying European nations should not allow "other major powers, including allies" to "put themselves in a situation to decide our diplomacy [and] security for us."

Merkel, Macron and other European leaders visited the White House over the past few weeks to try to persuade Trump to remain in the agreement, to no avail.

Merkel and Macron released a joint statement with British Prime Minister Theresa May on Tuesday saying they will remain in the agreement aimed at preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

Every May 9th the Russian Federation celebrates its most important national holiday, Victory Day, den' pobedy. During the early hours of that day in 1945 Marshal Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov, commander of the 1st Belorussian Front, which had stormed Berlin, received the German unconditional surrender. The Great Patriotic War had gone on for 1418 days of unimaginable violence, brutality and destruction. From Stalingrad and the northern Caucasus and from the northwestern outskirts of Moscow to the western frontiers of the Soviet Union to Sevastopol in the south and Leningrad and the borders with Finland, in the north, the country had been laid waste. An estimated 17 million civilians, men, women and children, had perished, although no one will ever know the exact figure. Villages and towns were destroyed; families were wiped out without anyone to remember them or mourn their deaths.

Michael Isikoff and David Corn lie so many times in their new book, so that the motive would be puzzling, except that it's really not, because they lie in accord with the U.S. Government's own demonstrable lies, which happen also to be basic to today's CIA - so, Isikoff-Corn's propagandistic agenda, at least, is clear and consistent - they lie for a clearly identifiable propagandistic purpose, the U.S. Government's purpose, as will be documented here.

Their book is titled RUSSIAN ROULETTE: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump. It was published on March 13th, and already (as of this writing) has 541 customer reviews at Amazon, with the average customer-review rating being 4.8 out of 5 stars - almost as favorable as can possibly be. This book will be reviewed here. There is lots of precedent for the CIA controlling the press in America, starting with the establishment of the CIA's operation Mockingbird in 1948, which continues to this day. One illustrative example (Udo Ulfkotte) of the CIA's control over the media will be briefly cited, before getting to the main topic, the Isikoff-Corn book.

Udo Ulfkotte was a prominent German journalist who reported, and finally became an editor, for the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung, during the 17 years from 1986 through 2003, and who then seems to have become increasingly alienated from the journalistic profession, and consumed by moral pangs about his having been secretly a German propaganda-agent of the U.S. CIA, as he subsequently reported in his confessional book, which is banned in the U.S., and which was titled Journalists for Hire: How the CIA Buys the News. (Russian TV interviewed him about it in English.) The Isikoff-Corn book might as well have been written for the CIA, like Ulfkotte used to do, but at least Isikoff-Corn have done it (if they did - there could be other reasons why they lie consistently in accord with the U.S. Government's lies) for their own nation's 'intelligence' service, and they seem (unlike Ulfkotte) to be quite shameless in the lies that they indubitably tell.

Hundreds of thousands of Muscovites are taking part in the so-called 'Immortal Regiment' march, carrying photographs of their relatives in memory of those who took part in the Great Patriotic War (a term used in Russia and other former Soviet republics to describe hostilities on the eastern fronts of World War II in 1941-1945).

The organizers of the march called on everyone who wants to pay tribute to their relatives perished during the years of the war, to take to the streets across Russia in a symbolic action.

As the head of the vast column reached Red Square, it was joined by President Putin, who held a photograph of his late father, who fought in WWII.

"I think that my father, like millions of ordinary soldiers, and he was an ordinary soldier, has all the right to walk through this [Red] square," President Putin told the journalists.

A massive military parade was held in Moscow to commemorate the 73rd anniversary of the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945) against Nazi Germany in the European theater of World War II; Russia showcased many of its advanced, recently-developed weapons and displayed the might of its armed forces to the world.