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Top Palestinian negotiator rips into 'discredited, useless' Abbas

Saeb Erekat
© Miriam AlsterSaeb Erekat
A leaked audio recording of chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat harshly criticizing PA President Mahmoud Abbas over his reluctance to pursue Israel in the international arena exposed severe fissures within the Palestinian leadership regarding how best to engage Israel following the collapse of US-brokered negotiations in April, and showed profound disdain by Erekat for his president.

In the video, Erekat says Abbas has lost his credibility, slams his "useless" approach, and compares him to Saddam Hussein and Bashar Assad. The top Palestinian negotiator also says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal who isn't "worth the bullet" to shoot him.

The source and time of Erekat's speech were not reported, but in the edited three-minute recording, uploaded to YouTube late Wednesday night by the Awraq News Agency, the Palestinian official accused his president of acting autocratically against the will of a majority of the Palestinian leadership, which voted for a harsher stance against Israel.

USA

Flashback How US fuelled myth of Zarqawi the mastermind

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Zarqawi, a "terrorist leader" myth created by US intelligence to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist leader believed to be responsible for the abduction of Kenneth Bigley, is 'more myth than man', according to American military intelligence agents in Iraq.

Several sources said the importance of Zarqawi, blamed for many of the most spectacular acts of violence in Iraq, has been exaggerated by flawed intelligence and the Bush administration's desire to find "a villain" for the post-invasion mayhem.

US military intelligence agents in Iraq have revealed a series of botched and often tawdry dealings with unreliable sources who, in the words of one source, "told us what we wanted to hear".

"We were basically paying up to $10,000 a time to opportunists, criminals and chancers who passed off fiction and supposition about Zarqawi as cast-iron fact, making him out as the linchpin of just about every attack in Iraq," the agent said.

"Back home this stuff was gratefully received and formed the basis of policy decisions. We needed a villain, someone identifiable for the public to latch on to, and we got one."

Airplane

Electronic war games blamed for jets disappearing off radars in Europe

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Electronic military exercises were to blame for the mysterious disappearance of dozens of planes from air-traffic control screens in the heart of Europe, Slovak authorities have said.

About 50 planes temporarily disappeared from radars in Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia between June 5 and June 10, Austria's flight safety monitor said.

German and Czech air traffic control also reported brief disappearances.

Slovakia blamed the outages on planned military exercises.

"The disappearance of objects on radar screens was connected with a planned military exercise which took place in various parts of Europe...whose goal was the interruption of radio communication frequencies," the Slovak air traffic services said in a statement.

"This activity also caused the temporary disappearance of several targets on the radar display, while in the meantime the planes were in radio contact with air traffic controllers and continued in their flight normally."

Comment: Or...the planes disappearing from radar could be a direct result of two X-Class solar flares that took place during the time frame in question. Data from the Space Weather Prediction Center illustrates just such an occurrence, as can be seen here with the GOES X-ray flux data.

X-Class solar flares have been observed to cause radio blackout due to the ionosphere's D-Region Absorption of said flares. Where was the affected region during one of these events? Europe, which can be seen here.

Currently the Sun's output is low relative to historical solar maximums and double X-Class flares could reasonably be seen as anomalous. Unless the flares were caused by Sun diving comets, which apparently was the case.

Watch this video for a quick rundown of how everything transpired in "real-time".


Info

Situations report from the frontlines in Ukraine June 13th by Juan

White Phosphorous bombs used in Ukraine
© Youtube/NEF AcuraUkraine military reportedly dropped incendiary bombs on villages near Slavyansk
1. Fighting central Mariupol near Novorossiya command post. Increasing intensity 06:15 13 June.

2. Minimum 3 main battle tanks Nats Army outside Lugansk captured by Army Novorossiya and are in use by new owners.

3. White Phosphor artillery shells used to bombard several villages around Slavyansk and Slavyansk City late evening and night. Fires in one village and Slavyansk City.

4. Unconfirmed but deemed reliable sources indicate chemical weapons and/or biological weapons to be used in Peoples Republic of Donetsk against civilian and Army Novorossiya targets coupled with simultaneous high casualty attacks against civilian targets in central and west Ukraine. Unconfirmed but reliable reports state Ambassador J. Pyatt of USA knows of this plan. Operations are scheduled for 3 to 5 days from 12 June 2014. Army Novorossiya is to be implicated in chemical and terror attacks.

5. Strong Nats armor column advancing on Lugansk City has been stopped on the outskirts by local self defense units. Several Nats tanks and BTR's destroyed in fighting.

6. Civilian dead from bombardments Slavyansk area night of 12 June including at least 2 children.

Windsock

Kiev junta shoots itself in the foot yet again: Refuses to pay debts and prepares for cuts in Russian gas supplies

gas metering station Uzhgorod
© AFPA picture taken on May 21, 2014 shows a gas metering station "Uzhgorod" near the Chaslivci village, not far from western Ukrainian city of Uzhgorod.
Ukrainian Prime Minster Arseny Yatsenyuk has ordered Energy and Coal ministries, regional governments, and Naftogaz to get ready for Russian gas supplies to be cut starting Monday, the cabinet's website said.

The measure is dubbed "the energy sector's functioning plan which involves the cessation of gas deliveries from the Russian Federation" and comes into effect on June 16, the document states.

With that, Kiev will launch its case against the Russian energy giant Gazprom at the Stockholm Court of Arbitration, the statement said. Yatsenyuk called for "preparations to be completed" for the process.

Moscow set Monday as a deadline for Ukraine to pay off part of its gas debt of $1.95 billion.

Yatseniuk also ordered the national regulator to revise transportation tariffs for Russian gas via Ukraine as Russia ships around a half of its gas exports to Europe through Ukraine.

Despite ordering the measures effectively undermining current gas talks with Russia, Yatsenyuk still blamed Moscow for the failure of the talks.

Comment: Well there you have it, "Yats" is completely insane and will destroy his country, all the while blaming Russia for everything like a spoiled child. Just the kind of puppet that the US loves!


Eye 1

The war on compassion: In 33 U.S. cities, it's illegal to do the one thing that helps the homeless most

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© AP
The news: In case the United States' problem with homelessness wasn't bad enough, a forthcoming National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH) report says that 33 U.S. cities now ban or are considering banning the practice of sharing food with homeless people. Four municipalities (Raleigh, N.C.; Myrtle Beach, S.C.; Birmingham, Ala.; and Daytona Beach, Fla.) have recently gone as far as to fine, remove or threaten to throw in jail private groups that work to serve food to the needy instead of letting government-run services do the job.

Why it's happening: The bans are officially instituted to prevent government-run anti-homelessness programs from being diluted. But in practice, many of the same places that are banning food-sharing are the same ones that have criminalized homelessness with harsh and punitive measures. Essentially, they're designed to make being homeless within city limits so unpleasant that the downtrodden have no choice but to leave. Tampa, for example, criminalizes sleeping or storing property in public. Columbia, South Carolina, passed a measure that essentially would have empowered police to ship all homeless people out of town. Detroit PD officers have been accused of illegally taking the homeless and driving them out of the city.

Comment: Basic human values like compassion, decency, morality are all foreign and threatening to psychopaths, those who are ruling societies. That is why they are doing everything they could to destroy those values and turn normal people into pseudo-psychopaths.


Dollars

Pentagon spent millions on boats that were never delivered to landlocked Afghanistan

patrol boat
© Courtesy of the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan ReconstructionOne of the patrol boats purchased.
Despite being billed a "top priority" for American efforts in Afghanistan, a new government watchdog report found that the United States spent more than $3 million obtaining eight patrol boats that were never used.

Authored by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the report stated the purchases were made back in 2010, but about four years later the boats are still sitting unused in a Virginia warehouse.

What's more, the report is raising questions about why the boats were needed in the first place. After all, Afghanistan is a landlocked country, with no coastline or prominent waters to speak of.

According to the Washington Post, military officials said the boats were originally intended desired as a way to move government supplies along the Amu Darya River near the border of Uzbekistan, as well as to "deter smuggling and illegal entry into Afghanistan."

Additionally, the cost of each boat turned out to be about $375,000 - far more than the $50,000 they usually sell for in the US. As noted by Fox News, the SIGAR report also raised concerns over how the boats would be repaired, since the nearest port would have been 1,000 miles away in Pakistan.

Yet despite authorizing the expenditure of millions of dollars, just nine months later US and NATO officials determined the boats were not needed. Since 80 percent of the money was already spent and the boats were nearly completed, inspector general John Sopko found that "it was decided that the contract should be allowed to proceed to completion."

During his investigation into the matter, Sopko discovered that records related to the purchase and cancellation of the patrol boats are severely lacking, and his questions to the military have not resulted in adequate answers.

"The military has been unable to provide records that would answer the most basic questions surrounding this $3 million purchase," his office told the Post in a statement.

War Whore

Iraqi army collapses against Al-Qaeda spinoff in Mosul

Iraqi Army Collapses Against Al-Qaeda Spinoff in Mosul
An armored vehicle belonging to Iraqi security forces engulfed in flames in Mosul, Iraq on Tuesday.
The governor of Ninevah province, Athil al-Nujaifi, blames "Maliki and his policies" for the fall of Mosul.

After a long night of shelling between government forces and armed groups in the province of Ninevah in northern Iraq, Ahmed al-Muslawi and his family decided to flee Mosul for Iraqi Kurdistan. When he awoke the next morning, he learned that the city had fallen into the hands of radical organizations, and that the shelling had stopped.

Speaking to Al-Monitor by phone, Muslawi said he didn't expect the city to fall that way. Mosul residents, according to him, expected the course of events in their city to resemble what happened in Anbar province in western Iraq, where government military operations have continued for more than six months.

Muslawi, a clothing store owner, said, "When the militants took control of the city, they knocked on the doors of houses and told residents that they would not be targeted at all ... and that their dispute was with the central government and its army."

According to Muslawi, the militants forced the owners of bakeries and gas stations to return to their jobs.

War Whore

Iraq's terrorists are becoming a full-blown army

iraq full blown army
© Warrick Page/Getty
The group so extreme it got booted from al Qaeda controls huge swaths of territory. And now ISIS has got the heavy weaponry to back it up.
With the fall of Mosul on Tuesday, Iraq's al Qaeda offshoot has not only seized the country's second-largest city, it appears it also has come into possession of the heavy weapons and vehicles the U.S. military had provided Iraq's military to fight them.

That's terrible news for America's few allies left in Iraq as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Sham (ISIS) morph from terrorist menace to a military force capable of over-running an army the U.S. military trained for nearly a decade. It also calls into question the American government's decision to withdraw the last of its forces from Iraq in 2011. Three years later that withdrawal now appears premature.

ISIS themselves appear to be pleased with the booty of the Mosul campaign. On Twitter the group posted a photo of a beaming Umar al-Shishani, a senior ISIS commander, examining a captured American-made Humvee, which had already been driven from the Iraqi city to the eastern Syrian town of Deir ez-Zor. "Umar al-Shishani inspects spoils of war...Looks quite pleased," the tweet said.

Stock Down

Congress's Iraq invaders helplessly watch their conquests lost to new conquerors

Nineveh refugees
© SAFIN HAMED/AFP/Getty ImagesIraqi families fleeing violence in the northern Nineveh province.
Americans are tired of war. For the 17 members of Congress who served in Iraq, that means watching helplessly as the cities they fought for fall once more to extremists.

Militants believed to be associated with al-Qaida overtook Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq, on Tuesday. The group then seized Tikrit, hometown of former President Saddam Hussein, on Wednesday.

Three Republican congressmen who served in Iraq - Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Doug Collins of Georgia, and Brad Wenstrup of Ohio - said it feels like the progress they made has been thrown away.

"Going out across the desert I remember the feelings that you have, wondering if you're going to make it out alive," Perry said. "Right now I wonder what that was all about. What was the point of all of that?"

Comment: Indeed, what was the point? Oil? Israel? The U.S. made this mess, and it should be the one to clean it up. Unfortunately, it's unlikely the U.S. has the intelligence, means, or motivation to do anything about it. When their list of options can be counted on two fingers (military intervention, or do nothing), that should be a sign that the U.S. government is a complete and utter failure. Future historians will be right to look back at the present time and shake their heads at the West's catastrophic arrogance, stupidity, and blind cruelty.