German drones may soon be flying over Ukraine as part of the OSCE mission to monitor the truce between Kiev forces and militia fighters. The German Defense Ministry has sent a team to southeastern Ukraine. France is also considering sending drones.

The ministry announced its readiness to fulfill the OSCE's request in an official statement published on Bundeswehr's (Germany's armed forces) website.

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has reinforced fighters who are battling Kurdish forces for control of a Syrian town at the border with Turkey, a redeployment triggered by US-led airstrikes on the group elsewhere, a Kurdish military official said.

Ocalan Iso, deputy leader of the Kurdish forces defending the town of Kobani at the Turkish border, said more ISIS fighters and tanks had arrived since the US-led coalition began air strikes on the group on Tuesday.

"The number of their fighters has increased, the number of their tanks has increased since the bombardment of Raqqa," Iso told Reuters by telephone. He repeated calls for the US-led coalition to expand its airstrikes to ISIS positions near Kobani, which is also known as Ayn al-Arab.


"Kobani is in danger," he said.

The US-led airstrikes on ISIS in Syria, without the consent of Damascus, have so far targeted the provinces of Raqqa, Deir al-Zor and Hasakah.

ISIS launched a major offensive against Kobani last week, forcing nearly 140,000 Syrian Kurds to flee across the border into Turkey within days - the largest and fastest exodus of civilians since the Syrian conflict began in 2011.

Iso said ISIS fighters had advanced to within 8 km (5 miles) from the southern periphery of Kobani - closer than they have been at any stage in the latest offensive.

"We call on American forces to hit their positions. They are 8 km from Kobani. They were 25 km away before," he said.

A group of several dozen Syrian Kurds who had fled the fighting watched from a hillside on the Turkish side of the border as Kurdish fighters battled ISIS militants in a cluster of villages called Siftek. The sound of sporadic artillery and gunfire echoed around the hills.

With the recent and ongoing airstrikes launched against Syria by the United States and its "regional" and NATO allies, a number of questions have arisen from a variety of quarters who remain entirely confused as to the ongoing angles of the players involved in the Syrian crisis. Confusion, of course, is a natural state resulting from the mainstream media's attempt to conceal the fact that the United States and NATO/GCC are entirely responsible for the Syrian crisis to begin with as well as for the massive seizure of territory across Iraq and Syria by ISIS militants. These same media outlets have also played a major role in the obfuscation of the understanding of the crisis by providing false delineations and name changes bound to confuse an American population already afflicted with a short attention span.

With even the basic facts surrounding the Syrian crisis forced into obscurity by mass ignorance of their existence, the facts surrounding the recent US bombing of Syria have also given way to more questions.

For that reason, a number of points must be made regarding the recent events and those that will unfold in the future inside Syria.

Information Does Not Equal Coordination

The recent airstrikes by the United States and its allies allegedly against ISIS positions in Syria have been soundly condemned by both Iran and Russia . Both countries have accurately pointed out that the airstrikes were a violation of Syria's national sovereignty and a violation of international law. Syria, however, has refrained from outrage and has even stated that the United States informed it of the attacks before they took place.

Syria's reaction has caused many to believe one of two things: First, that the United States truly is focused on eliminating ISIS; and, second, that the United States and Syria are now working together to achieve this end.
Despite Syria's forbearance, however, the truth is far from either of these ideas. The United States is in no way interested in destroying its own proxy army nor is it interested in working with the secular Assad government. After all, Assad and the Syrian government are the ultimate target of the West to begin with.

Syria has once again slammed the Israeli regime's support for the Takfiri ISIL militants operating inside the Arab country.

A Syrian military official, whose name was not mentioned in the reports, made the comments on Tuesday after Tel Aviv said earlier in the day that it had shot down a Syrian warplane as it attempted to fly over the ceasefire line into the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.


The official confirmed the shooting down and underlined that the move was based on Tel Aviv's policy of supporting ISIL Takfiris.

The aircraft was apparently a MiG-21 fighter jet which was downed by a surface-to-air Patriot missile, the Army radio said, adding that the wreckage landed on the Syrian side of the plateau.

However, an unnamed Israeli military official identified the downed aircraft as a Sukhoi Su-24 Russian fighter plane.

The development comes amid heavy clashes on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights. The Syrian government has been hitting back at the foreign-backed militants there with frequent airstrikes.

Syria has been gripped by deadly violence since March 2011.

US airstrikes meant to hit ISIL targets in Syria have killed at least five civilians, says a foreign-backed Syrian opposition group.

The civilians, including one child, were killed in the airstrikes on ISIL positions in northeastern Hasakeh, said the so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The group said fourteen militants have also been killed in the raids on the eastern province of Deir Ezzor.

Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said at least one militant checkpoint was hit during the overnight attacks. The raids targeted oil facilities captured by the ISIL.

The crisis in Ukraine was caused by the blatant interference of the United States and the European Union in its affairs, Russian Permanent Representative to the OSCE, Andrei Kelin, said on Monday.

"The Ukrainian crisis was provoked by the US and EU interference. It was the United States that grossly but customarily interfered in Ukraine's internal affairs, breaching the Helsinki principles and the UN Charter," Kelin said at the Warsaw Human Dimension Session of the 2014 OSCE Review Conference.

"It was the United States that encouraged the state coup in Kiev in February and the punitive operation in the east of the country, which left 3,000 people killed and made hundreds of thousands flee their homes," the diplomat said.

Jund al-Khilafa, an ISIS-aligned militant group in Algeria, released a video Wednesday allegedly showing the beheading of Hervé Gourdel, a French tourist it held captive and threatened to kill if French President Francois Hollande didn't withdraw from the U.S.-led coalition of airstrikes in Iraq. The jihadists reportedly released the video on Twitter, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors terrorist chatter.

The 4-minute, 46-second video, titled "A Message with Blood to the French Government," features footage of Hollande. Gourdel is shown on his knees speaking as men wrapped in headscarves and carrying guns stand behind him. SITE said the footage doesn't show the actual beheading, but another shot shows Gourdel's severed head resting on his lap before the men hold up his head.

The video is similar to the beheadings of U.S. journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and British aid worker David Cawthorne Haines at the hands of ISIS. SITE said Jund al-Khilafa has taken cues from the group, now known as the Islamic State."As the Islamic State has instructed its supporters all over the world to execute attacks, the beheading of this French hostage may not be the last demonstration of this nature," said SITE Director Rita Katz.

Russia's State Duma plans to widen legal protection for people who help fight corruption among state officials, reporting the cases to police or the media. The bill is currently in the works, Izvestia reported.

The amendments to the existing anti-corruption law have been suggested by MP Ilya Kostunov, of United Russia, who's a member of the lower house of parliament's security and anti-corruption committee.

According to Kostunov, many people who report cases of corruption within their work environment are forced to quit their jobs by their bosses. The new bill should help protect these people, the deputy says.

"There is a presidential decree that enacts protection for those who report corruption cases. According to this decree, anti-corruption fighters can only be fired by a prosecutor's order, and they should also be guaranteed free legal assistance. But these rules are widely being flouted," Kostunov said.

The U.S. today began bombing targets inside Syria, in concert with its lovely and inspiring group of five allied regimes: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Jordan.

That means that Syria becomes the 7th predominantly Muslim country bombed by 2009 Nobel Peace Laureate Barack Obama - after Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Iraq.

The utter lack of interest in what possible legal authority Obama has to bomb Syria is telling indeed: Empires bomb who they want, when they want, for whatever reason (indeed, recall that Obama bombed Libya even after Congress explicitly voted against authorization to use force, and very few people seemed to mind that abject act of lawlessness; constitutional constraints are not for warriors and emperors).

It was just over a year ago that Obama officials were insisting that bombing and attacking Assad was a moral and strategic imperative. Instead, Obama is now bombing Assad's enemies while politely informing his regime of its targets in advance. It seems irrelevant on whom the U.S. wages war; what matters it that it be at war, always and forever.

Among the many evils of monetary central planning is the conceit that 12 members of the FOMC can tweak the performance of a $17 trillion economy on virtually a month to month basis - using the crude tools of interest rate pegging and word cloud emissions (i.e. "verbal guidance"). Read the FOMC meeting minutes or the actual transcripts (with a five-year release lag) and they sound like an economic weather report. Unlike the TV weathermen, however, our monetary politburo actually endeavors to control the economic climate for the period immediately ahead.

Accordingly, the Fed is pre-occupied with utterly transient and frequently revised-away monthly release data on retail sales, housing starts, auto production, business investment, employment, inflation and the like. But its always about the latest ticks in the data - never about the larger patterns and the deeper longer-term trends.

And of course that's the essence of the Keynesian affliction. The denizens of the Eccles Building - -overwhelmingly academics and policy apparatchiks - -rarely venture into the blooming, buzzing messiness of the real economic world. They simplistically believe, therefore, that the US economy is just a giant bathtub that must the filled to the brim with "aggregate demand" and all will be well.

Filling the economic bathtub is accomplished through something called "monetary accommodation", which essentially means credit expansion. That is, market capitalism left to its own devices is held to have an inherently suicidal tendency toward depression - or at least chronic recessions and underperformance. As the Keynesians have it, households and businesses almost always spend too little and therefore need to be induced to become more exuberant in the shopping aisles and on the factory floor.

In this framework, the blunt instrument of artificially depressed interest rates is the natural policy tool of choice. If cautious households are saving too much for a rainy day or even their children's education or their own retirement - - why then club them with ZIPR (zero interest rates). Get them shopping until they drop. Likewise, if businessmen are too benighted to see the case for opening another store or buying a new lift truck for their warehouse (or expanding same), bribe them with cheap debt financing.