Puppet Masters
A car bomb outside the G4S compound in east Kabul was followed up by attackers on foot who managed to get inside the building.
Five of the company's staff were among the dead, including a Briton and four Afghans, in an attack claimed by Taliban insurgents.
Several hundred people are understood to have taken refuge in bunkers as Afghan army commandos spent hours trying to clear the compound of attackers.
Local television footage showed a huge crater and widespread damage to buildings after the attack which struck on Wednesday evening.
G4S said another 32 staff were injured in what it called an "unprovoked, criminal attack".
Netanyahu's comments followed the publication Monday of a poll by CNN that showed over 20 percent of Europeans believe Jews have "too much influence" across the world.
"The best answer to anti-Semitism is the State of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces," Netanyahu, who has also been serving as defense minister since the resignation earlier this month of Avigdor Liberman, told the soldiers. "Once we were a leaf driven by the wind; they could slaughter us. Today, we have the power to respond."
Comment: How victims of monsters become monsters themselves... Israel doesn't just 'respond', it actively slaughters: men, women, children, journalists, photographers, medics... It also supports monsters like ISIS and al-Qaeda to serve its own interests. Not exactly a model for combatting racism.
Netanyahu's visit coincided with a 10-day training exercise the brigade is conducting throughout the country, practicing its responses to various complex attack scenarios against Israel and Israeli civilians by different enemies.

US Air Force F-15E Strike Eagles are designed to conduct airstrikes in Syria and Iraq
Syrian media has reported that the US-led coalition airstrike on the town of Hajin in the Deir ez-Zor province has left at least 6 casualties.
According to the the Ikhbariya television channel, there are also injured people as a result of the strike, while their number remains unknown.
Comment: For having the reputation of the most technically-advanced military in the world, the US has a dismal record of limiting civilian deaths in its operations. Or maybe there's a larger plan?
- Bad aim or intentional? Report of US-led coalition strike on Raqqa killing 20 civilians
- At least 15 civilians killed in another illegal US-led coalition strike on Deir ez-Zor
- US-led coalition reluctantly admits to another 28 civilian deaths in their war on Syria - unofficial total over 6,000 since 2014
- Syrian State Media reports US-led coalition use of banned white phosphorus on civilians
- Damascus urges UN to immediately halt US coalition strikes, which 'spread chaos & benefit terrorists'
- Russian General: US trying to destroy Syria's critical infrastructure and complicate reconstruction

Former head of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine General Nikolay Malomuzh
The sailors who violated the border of Russia in the Kerch Strait and were detained by the border service of the FSB were "set up" by the authorities in Kiev, stated the former head of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine General Nikolay Malomuzh in an interview to the "Politeka" website. According to him, the ships of the Naval Forces of Ukraine came on territory that is controlled by Russia, and events could unfold in only one way - the detention of the violators with the use of weapons.
Comment: It should surprise no one that the West was able to push Poroshenko into such a reckless action. The Western neocons have been spoiling for a war with Russia for decades. From overt provocations in Syria, fomenting a coup in Ukraine, undermining Russian pipeline deals in Europe, the list is endless. Only the cool, level-headed responses from Putin and his team have prevented events from boiling over.
- Uki election antics? Poroshenko declares martial law in Ukraine after Kerch standoff
- Drama in the Kerch Strait: A desperate ploy by West to undermine upcoming Trump/Putin meet
- Russia and Ukraine teetering on the brink of war in Azov Sea thanks to US support of Kiev regime
- Russia needs to stop believing the West is governed by law

"Yellow vest" protesters have been demonstrating around France against fuel taxes.
The French leader is walking a tightrope between keeping his showy pledge to "Make Our Planet Great Again", making good on his country's Paris Climate Agreement leadership, and calming the self-styled "yellow vests", an amorphous movement that argues that Macron's eco-minded fuel-tax hikes punish working-class consumers outside urban centres first and foremost.
Comment: Globalist Macron's rule-by-fiat style is wearing thin with French citizens.
- Yellow Vests protest in Paris turns into riot on Champs Elysee as massive rallies grip France for eighth day (UPDATES)
- Why Drivers Are Leading a Protest Movement Across France
Massive 'Yellow Vest' protests over fuel price hikes, which have swarmed the streets of French cities for almost two weeks, have the support of about two thirds of the French, a new poll shows.A dangerous situation in the longer run. The French people have dealt with autocratic rulers once before and it wasn't pretty.
Protests turned violent with rioters setting barricades ablaze and police unleashing tear gas and water cannon at the demonstrators. Some scenes, especially in the heart of Paris, looked like a warzone. The rallies were triggered not only by rising fuel prices, but also President Emmanuel Macron and his unpopular efforts to overhaul France.
It turns out that people across France strongly support the upheaval, a new OpinionWay poll showed. The survey asked over 1000 people and 66 percent answered that they stand for the protesters.
The poll was conducted on Tuesday when Macron addressed the demonstrators, offering them minor concessions. They included a three-month consultation with associations that lead the protests and a proposal of a mechanism to adjust tax hikes. He, however, refused to scrap the rise in fuel taxes on diesel and petrol which are due to come into force in January 2019.
The speech angered at least 76 percent of the respondents who called his measures "wholly" or "mostly insufficient," the survey showed. Nearly 80 percent still oppose the planned fuel tax hike.
With this result, the 2018 Senate elections have come to a close. The GOP maintains control, with a net gain of two seats in the midterm elections. They will go into 2019 with a 53-47 edgea. Overall, six seats changed hands. Republicans won seats in Florida, Indiana, Missouri and North Dakota, while Democrats were able to take the seats in Arizona and Nevada.
WikiLeaks is ready to sue Britain's Guardian newspaper for a "fabricated Manafort story" that accused Julian Assange of secretly meeting Donald Trump's former election campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
Manafort agreed to take part in the Mueller probe over Russia's alleged meddling into the 2016 US election but he denies co-operating with Russia or ever meeting Assange.
The author of the report, Luke Harding, based his claim on "sources" and a document "written by Ecuador's Senain intelligence agency and seen by the Guardian," which the newspaper didn't publish.
"As part of the plea bargain, Purdue agreed to pay the federal government $600 million and 27 states $20 million. The three executives agreed to $34.5 million in fines but avoided jail-time. By contrast, Purdue has earned an estimated $31 billion in total revenues from extended-release oxycodone since its launch. Rather than deterring fraudulent marketing, the penalties simply became a cost of doing business."A cost of doing business. The preceding is an excerpt from a Harvard study published last year titled "The Opioid Epidemic: Fixing a Broken Pharmaceutical Market". It describes the illicit marketing practices advanced by Purdue's executives for its wildly profitable opioid Oxycontin, and how the criminal and civil cases brought against the company for those practices weren't consequential enough to prevent those practices from remaining highly profitable.
Big pharma has the highest profit margins of any industry in the United States and is also the number one lobbying industry in the United States, a correlation which won't surprise anyone who knows anything worth knowing about politics in capitalist societies. One of the many, many ways that the US government has collaborated with these massive pharmaceutical corporations to increase their profit margins has been to put into place laws which make them obscenely difficult to sue, therefore rendering the cost of the few lawsuit settlements which get through a mere drop in the bucket of profits made by unethical marketing practices. Even fines for downright illegal practices can be chalked up to mere overhead, with the largest fine ever levied against a drug company being $3 billion against GlaxoSmithKline, which sounds like a lot if you don't know that Glaxo raked in $27.5 billion just that year.
On November 21st, the Atlantic Council "an American think tank in the field of international affairs," which can also be described as NATO and the US's public relations office published a report called "Beyond Borderlands Ensuring the Sovereignty of All Nations of Eastern Europe."
As expected, the report primarily focuses on Russian influence, since other influence from the EU and the US cannot be considered any sort of influence, especially not bad. It also primarily focuses on Ukraine.
In the section dubbed "Security Assistance in the Short and Medium Terms," the situation in the Sea of Azov is highlighted.
"Russia is currently occupying and militarizing Ukrainian Crimea, conducting a simmering, hybrid war in the Donbas, and obstructing Ukrainian shipping in the Sea of Azov."Furthermore, the section looked at the conflict between Russia and Georgia in 2008, claiming that Russian "peacekeeper in South Ossetia periodically move the line of demarcation farther into Georgia."
Comment: See also:
- Where is The Logic in Ukraine Provoking Russia?
- While Kiev whips up confusion and panic, Ukraine citizens try to figure what martial law will mean for them
- UK to supply extra military forces to Ukraine: An irresponsible policy with dangerous repercussions
Facebook has publicly denied being a media publisher every time there is an issue with content on its site. The company has long claimed to simply be a platform for their users to utilize and as a result, the social media firm cannot be held accountable for the content posted there. But in a recent lawsuit, the company has claimed the exact opposite.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has denied that Facebook is a publisher publicly before the Senate. From Breitbart's article at the time:












Comment: See also: