The Damascus government says Turkish forces have entered war-torn northern Syria to help foreign-backed militants fighting against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry in a protest letter to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) said on Sunday that "around 100 gunmen some of whom are believed to be Turkish forces and Turkish mercenaries" entered Syria through A'zaz area which is located north of Aleppo near the Turkish border.

It also noted that the Turkish forces were accompanied by a dozen pick-up trucks mounted with heavy machine guns.

"The operation of supplying ammunition and weapons is continuing via the Bab al-Salama crossing to the Syrian area of Azaz," the ministry said.

Republican lawmakers and presidential candidates hardened their positions on Sunday on blocking a move by President Barack Obama to fill the seat left by the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, a lifetime appointment that would help decide some of the most divisive issues facing Americans.

The next justice could tilt the balance of the nation's highest court, which was left with four conservatives and four liberals. The vacancy quickly became an issue in the 2016 presidential race.

"We ought to make the 2016 election a referendum on the Supreme Court," U.S. Senator and Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Ukraine's interior minister said he could drop a media bombshell that would force foreign sponsors to stop all support for Kiev. The claim comes as the cabinet hangs in peril over the resignation of a reformist economy minister, who quit citing covert corruption.

Aivaras Abromavicius announced his resignation as economy minister last week, saying he doesn't want to be part of the plundering of Ukraine committed by corrupt officials. The move sparked a political crisis in Ukraine and resulted in the International Monetary Fund warning that it may suspend the multibillion dollar credit line to Kiev, unless it starts a genuine crackdown on corruption.

Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov has information that could hurt Ukraine's standing with its foreign sponsors much more than Abromavicius resignation did, he said in an interview with Zerkalo Nedeli newspaper published Friday.

"Do you doubt I could drop a media bombshell that would have an effect several times bigger than Abromavicius caused? But I don't want to take steps, which would only result in IMF Managing Director waving her hands sadly, take away the support of the country's foreign partners. Some things must be settled out of the public eye," the minister said.

Presstitute Media, such as the UK Telegraph, spend a lot of energy debunking exposes of government conspiracies. For example, the thousands of highrise architects, structural engineers, physicists, nano-chemists, demolition experts, first responders, military and civilian pilots, and former government officials who have provided vast evidence that the official story of 9/11 is a made-up fairy tale at odds with all evidence and the laws of physics are dismissed by presstitutes as "conspiracy theorists."

Similarly, those, such as James W. Douglass, who have proven beyond all doubt that President John F. Kennedy was not assassinated by Oswald but by his own paranoid anti-communist military-security complex, are dismissed as conspiracy theorists.

The 9/11 Commission Report and the Warren Commission Report were cover-ups. VP Dick Cheney and the neoconservatives he sponsored needed a "new Pearl Harbor" in order to begin their military assaults on the Middle Eastern countries that had independent foreign policies instead of being US/Israeli vassals. 9/11 was their orchestrated "new Pearl Harbor," and this fact had to be covered up when 9/11 families persisted in their demands for an investigation and could not be bought off for large sums of money.

Similarly, the Warren Commission had no choice but to cover up that a popular American president, John F. Kennedy, had been murdered by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the Secret Service, because he was believed by paranoid anti-communists to be "soft on communism" and thereby a threat to the security of the United States. The cold war was on, and the Warren Commission could not hold those responsible accountable without destroying the public's confidence in the American military and security services.

Nevertheless everyone aware of the forged case against Oswald knew what had happened. One of these people was Attorney General Robert Kennedy, JFK's brother.

Bobby Kennedy understood the situation. He knew that as a member of a cover-up administration he could do nothing about it. However, he knew that if he won the presidency, he could hold accountable those security elements responsible. His brother had told him that after his reelection he was going to "break the CIA into a thousand pieces." When the Vietnam war destroyed President Lyndon Johnson, Bobby Kennedy emerged as the next president of the US.

Greece's coast guard has reportedly arrested two "heavily armed" British men carrying more than a dozen guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition from Turkey, a top security official said.

A high-ranking security official told AP that the suspects were both Iraqi-born British subjects in their 20s. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the ongoing investigation.

The two were arrested Saturday night by coast guard officers near the port of the Greek city of Alexandroupolis, off the Turkish border.

This week on Behind the Headlines, Joe, Niall, Harrison and Bahar will be discussing the role of morality in politics (or rather, the lack of it), and will continue a discussion begun on the Truth Perspective show: the value of objectivity in a world gone mad.

What is truth and why is it important? What does it mean to 'be objective'? If people's beliefs about the world shape their individual experiences, and ultimately co-create the world they share with others, then a world saturated with lies, (apparently) harmless myths and dangerous narratives leads people to create a world in which they (and most others) are hopelessly miserable.

Is there a solution to this profound problem? What if people changed their beliefs? Would this create a happier, more stable world, at least for those who changed? But on what basis should people change their beliefs? And why bother if the only apparent change in the external world is that it keeps getting worse?

Join us this Sunday February 14th from 12-2pm EST / 6-8pm CET / 5-7pm UTC as we get to the heart of the matter at the eleventh hour for modern civilization.



Running Time: 02:06:00

Download: MP3

The Syrian government has confirmed that its army positions were targeted by Turkish shelling on Saturday, which also hit the positions of the Syrian Kurdish militias in the northern Aleppo province. Turkish shelling reportedly continued Sunday. The Syrian government has condemned the Turkish shelling of Syrian territory and described it as direct support for "terrorist" groups, Syrian state media reported Sunday, citing a letter to the United Nations. "Turkish artillery shelled Syrian territory, targeting Syrian Kurdish positions and the positions of the Syrian Arab Army," SANA news agency reported citing the letter.

Damascus sent the letter in response to Saturday's Turkish shelling of areas north of Aleppo recently captured by a Kurdish-backed alliance. In the letter the Syrian government condemned statements by Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu as "blatant interference" in Syrian affairs. Turkish military sources told Anadolu Agency that the shelling was continuing Sunday and several positions of YPG - the military wing of the Kurdish Democratic Union (PYD) - have been destroyed. The militias reportedly suffered a number of casualties, the sources added. The US has called on its NATO ally Turkey to cease artillery fire against Kurdish positions in Syria's territory, referring to Saturday's shelling. The US State Department pointed out the two sides have to join forces to combat Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL).

(Speech given in Rome at the Italian Parliament on January 29, 2016)

Friends and Comrades, it is a great honor to be standing here - at the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian Parliament.

One year ago I was driving through the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, monitoring the situation in the refugee camps there. Winter was approaching and the mountains on the Lebanese - Syrian border were covered by snow. It was cold, very cold.

Some 20 minutes, after leaving Baalbek, I spotted an extremely humble makeshift refugee camp, growing literally from the road, in the middle of nowhere.

I stopped. Together with my interpreter, I walked inside and engaged several people in conversation.

The situation was desperate. Children were hungry and could not register for schools through the UNHCR or through the Lebanese government, which, by that time, had almost collapsed. Many electronic food cards that were issued to the migrants did not function. Work permits were not offered, and without proper paperwork, local social services could not be used. In brief: a total disaster.

Russian pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko, who is serving a 20-year sentence in the US for alleged drug trafficking, has told reporters about numerous violations of his rights and "deliberate attempts to kill him" through cruel conditions and poor medical treatment.

"I would like to disclose what is going on, because I am tired of fighting the lawlessness that I experience here. There is no justice here, only lies that I cannot refute in time," Yaroshenko told Russian daily Izvestia.

"Everything that the American side is doing is absolute lies. We have repeatedly caught them lying, but it turned out that such things are legal here. Prosecutors are lying right in the court hall and the judge is backing them, says that this is all normal. They don't even bother to refute that they are lying. Earlier they claimed that they had never tortured or beaten me, but now they admit it," the pilot told reporters. "They just say that this is no big deal for them - to beat or torture someone," he added.

Reading Dennis Ross and David Ignatius is a good reminder that the neocons live in a different world than the rest of us. They do not conform their analysis to reality, but rather they conform reality to their view of the world. Where most people would be encouraged to read that Aleppo in Syria was about to be liberated from its 3.5 year occupation by al-Qaeda's Syrian franchise, the neocons see a disaster.

On the brink of al-Qaeda's defeat in Aleppo, the Washington Post's Ignatius is furious that, "President Obama won't approve military tactics that could actually shift the balance." Yes, he wants to shift the balance toward al-Qaeda because like the other neocons he is so invested in the idea of regime change in Syria that he would even prefer turning the country into another Libya than to see government forces defeat his jihadist insurgents. Failing to "shift the balance" toward al-Qaeda fighters in Aleppo only brings "greater misery for the Syrian people," in the world of Ignatius.

Ignatius's Washington Post, which has never seen a potential war it did not want to see turned into an actual war, thinks it a tragedy that the Syrian army's advance on al-Qaeda occupied Aleppo has "cut off all vital routes of supply from Turkey to the rebel-held areas of the city." Those would be Turkish supplies in support of al-Qaeda and ISIS rebels, but the Post is too deceptive to mention that fact.