Puppet MastersS


Oil Well

US-Russia agree to oil talks; Trump says price war is 'crazy'

Timothy Gardner, Darya Korsunskaya
Reuters
Mon, 30 Mar 2020 09:15 UTC
PutinTrump
© AFP/Brendan SmialowskiRussian President Vladimir Putin • US President Donald Trump
U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed during a phone call on Monday to have their top energy officials discuss slumping global oil markets, the Kremlin said, as Trump called Russia's price war with Saudi Arabia "crazy."

The agreement marks a new twist in global oil diplomacy since a failed deal earlier this month between the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and Russia to cut production ignited the price war between Russia and OPEC's de facto leader Saudi Arabia.

The fallout from the coronavirus pandemic also helped to send oil prices into a historic tailspin, threatening higher-cost drillers in the United States and around the globe with bankruptcy.

"Opinions on the current state of global oil markets were exchanged. It was agreed there would be Russo-American consultations about this through the ministers of energy," the Kremlin said in a readout of the call.
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Attention

US deploys Patriot system in Iraq in prep for 'another potential Iranian attack'

Oleg Burunov
Sputnik
Tue, 31 Mar 2020 16:16 UTC
Patriot systems
© AP/Ranier JensenUS Patriot surface to air missile system
On 10 March, General Kenneth McKenzie, chief of the US Central Command, said in an apparent reference to the Patriot interceptors, that the Pentagon is in the process of delivering its "air defence systems" to Iraq.

The Middle East Eye news outlet quoted unnamed sources as saying on Monday that the US military had deployed its Patriot missile defence system to the Ain al-Asad base in the western Iraqi province of Anbar.

According to the sources, the system is currently being assembled amid reports that the Pentagon plans to send two more Patriot batteries to an undisclosed location in Iraq. Baghdad has not yet commented on the matter.
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Better Earth

North Macedonia's accession to NATO? It's all about location, location, location

Paul Antonopoulos
InfoBrics
Mon, 30 Mar 2020 00:00 UTC
Zaev/Stoltenberg
© Reuters/Ognen TeofilovskiNorth Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev • NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg
Bulgaria says there is no Macedonian language but rather it is a Bulgarian dialect. There is academic consensus that the Ancient Macedonians were Greek. Albanians claim nearly half of North Macedonia in their project for Greater Albania. North Macedonia is a complex and complicated country, but despite this fact, on Friday, it became NATO's thirtieth member, with Secretary General of the Alliance, Jens Stoltenberg, saying:
"North Macedonia is now part of the NATO family, a family of thirty nations and almost one billion people. A family based on the certainty that, no matter what challenges we face, we are all stronger and safer together."
There was little surprise that U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo expressed jubilation by saying that their membership
"will support greater integration, democratic reform, trade, security and stability across the region. North Macedonia's accession also reaffirms to other aspirants that NATO's door remains open to those countries willing and able to make the reforms necessary to meet NATO's high standards, and to accept the responsibilities as well as benefits of membership."
Pompeo is effectively opening the floodgates for more NATO members.
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Magnify

29 more FBI spy warrants checked; DOJ IG found problems with ALL of them!

Chuck Ross
Daily Caller
Tue, 31 Mar 2020 11:37 UTC
Horowitz
© Reuters/Erin ScottDOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz
The Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General has a "lack of confidence" in the FBI's procedures to validate information used to obtain spy warrants on American citizens, the watchdog said in a report released Tuesday.

The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found errors in all 29 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant applications that were subject to the review.

The audit is a follow-up to an investigation of the FBI's surveillance of Carter Page, the former Trump campaign aide.

A report of that investigation blasted the FBI for making dozens of errors and omissions in four applications the bureau submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). The findings prompted the Justice Department to retract two of the warrants because they were based on faulty information.

The OIG review released Tuesday suggests that the FBI's problems are widespread.

Comment: Consistency is admirable unless it is errors!
From a dataset of more than 700 applications under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) submitted by eight FBI field offices, Inspector General Michael Horowitz and his team selected a sample of 29, made between October 2014 and September 2019, pertaining to US citizens or "green card" holders. They found an average of 20 errors in each one.


"We could not review original Woods Files for 4 of the 29 selected FISA applications because the FBI has not been able to locate them and, in 3 of these instances, did not know if they ever existed," Horowitz wrote.

Attorney General Bill Barr was "appalled" at the way the FISA process was abused, resulting "in one of the greatest political travesties in American history," DOJ spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said.

Two of those [Page] warrants have been ruled improperly obtained since, and the DOJ has moved to "quarantine" information obtained through all four from all pending investigations.

Even so, Barr and FBI Director Chris Wray insisted that FISA warrants remained a vital and "indispensable" tool to guard the US from national security threats, and urged lawmakers to extend those powers going forward.

Democrats, on the other hand, insisted that the actual takeaway from the audit was that the FBI was not evil, but merely incompetent.
See also:

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Attention

Craig Murray: The Daily Record is snooping into my home and finances. Who put them up to it?

Craig Murray
craigmurray.org
Wed, 01 Apr 2020 17:58 UTC
Craig Murray
© Getty ImagesFormer British ambassador Craig Murray
The day after I publish my article accusing the corporate media of being an active part of the conspiracy against Alex Salmond, and of giving disgracefully selective, slanted and biased coverage of the evidence of his trial, the Daily Record has decided to investigate my home and personal finances. Is not life full of little coincidences?

I received this email from the Daily Record's political editor.

I replied to him politely. This was probably a mistake - I should have just told him where to go.

Comment:

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Propaganda

EU throws tantrum that Russia, China provide stability in their world of manufactured panic


RFE/RL
Wed, 01 Apr 2020 17:53 UTC
coronavirus lab sample
© AP
Russia and China continue to deploy a campaign of disinformation around the coronavirus outbreak that could have "harmful consequences" for public health around the world, according to a report published by the EU's foreign-policy arm.

The document, published on April 1, was written by the Strategic Communications and Information Analysis Division of the European External Action Service (EEAS).

It says both state and state-backed actors "seek to exploit the public health crisis to advance geopolitical interests, often by directly challenging the credibility of the European Union and its partners."

The campaign poses a danger to effective crisis communication and public health, it says.

Comment: The EU is just mad because Russia and China have been more effective in providing aid and stability to its member states like Italy, than they have. Russia has also been extremely effective in how its handled the coronavirus, and they can't have people looking toward the country as a good example in not engaging the world in hysteria.

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Dollars

Looking out for her friends: Pelosi prioritises tax breaks for millionaires in fourth stimulus package

Eric A. Blair
The Gateway Pundit
Tue, 31 Mar 2020 17:45 UTC
pelosi rip trump speech
© Reuters / Joshua RobertsSpeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) rips up President Donald Trump's speech following his State of the Union address to a joint session of the US Congress in Washington, DC, February 4, 2020.
While House Speaker Nancy Pelosi talks endlessly about helping working Americans, she's quietly making an effort to get millions of dollars for millionaires.

Pelosi is proposing a rollback cap on state and local tax (SALT) deductions as part of the next coronavirus stimulus bill.

"A 2019 report from the Joint Committee on Taxation projected that of those who would face lower tax liability from elimination of the cap - which only affects those who itemize tax deductions - 94 percent earn at least $100,000," Fox News reports. "The government would lose out on $77.4 billion in tax dollars, with more than half of that amount being saved by taxpayers earning $1 million or more."

Comment:

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Oil Well

New government-run Russian oil company to potentially take over Rosneft operations in Venezuela


RT
Tue, 31 Mar 2020 17:36 UTC
oil tanker sunset
© Reuters / Jean-Paul Pelissier
A company specializing in the production and transportation of oil and gas has been set up in Russia, according to the state registry data. The new firm could take over projects in Venezuela after Rosneft sold its assets there.

Roszarubezhneft, which is owned by the Federal Agency for Government Property Management, will have an authorized capital of 322.7 billion rubles (over $4 billion).

Comment:

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Radar

Looks like the US is trying to reoccupy Iraq

Drago Bosnic
Fort Russ News
Mon, 30 Mar 2020 00:00 UTC
US soldiers in Iraq
A senior Iraqi political analyst warned against a new plot by Washington to deploy the elite forces after evacuating its so-called diplomatic centers and shutting down important military bases such as al-Qayyareh, K1 and Kirkuk.

"The US has started its moves and is trying to bring to power the Washington-backed Adnan al-Zorfi for the post of prime minister in Iraq," Karim al-Khikani said in an exclusive interview with the Arabic-language al-Maloumeh news website.

He noted that the recent movements by the US and reducing the number of its embassy staff in Baghdad and closing some of its military bases in Iraq on the pretext of coronavirus epidemic is merely a political game while pursuing certain goals.

"The US plans to deploy combat forces to Iraq to reoccupy the country by using force and bringing to power its favored candidate for the prime minister's post," al-Khikani added.

He reiterated that the US is trying to impose itself on Iraq by bullying and it may even resort to assassinating other figures following the assassination on January 3 of Iran's top anti-terror commander Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani along with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy head of Iraq's PMU, along with their companions.
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Document

Dr. Anthony Fauci: COVID-19 "may turn out to be like a bad flu season" - His peer reviewed article in stark contrast to his press briefings

Ana Laura Palomino García and Prof Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research
Tue, 31 Mar 2020 00:00 UTC
Anthony Fauci
© REUTERS/Kevin LamarqueAnthony Fauci (R), director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease and Dr. Anne Schuchat of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention speak with reporters during a press briefing about the Zika virus at the White House in Washington February 8, 2016.
Dr. Anthony Fauci and two co-authors published an article on March 26, 2020 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Anthony Fauci is head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In the article, linked below, he states that COVID-19 may turn out to be comparable to a seasonal flu or similar to two relatively minor flu pandemics in 1957 and 1968. It is estimated that seasonal flu kills about 500,000 people globally every year and the two flu pandemics he cited each are thought to have killed about a million people globally. Below is an excerpt of the article.

Covid-19 — Navigating the Uncharted
"On the basis of a case definition requiring a diagnosis of pneumonia, the currently reported case fatality rate is approximately 2%. In another article in the Journal, Guan et al. report mortality of 1.4% among 1099 patients with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19; these patients had a wide spectrum of disease severity. If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively."
It is not over yet, but this is much less than what our hysterical media and politicians have led us to believe. In the beginning of this historic, media-fueled panic, it sounded like millions would die in the US alone and tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, globally.

Comment: So just what the heck is going on here? One liklihood would be that he was "forced" to bolster the Covid-19 hysteria by the bigwigs at the World Health Organization (and elsewhere) with the threat to his position of power as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases if he didn't. And, while still trying to maintain his professional credibility, and hedge his bets, he writes the article widely seen by those mostly only in the medical profession: "See people - I said Covid-19 wasn't as bad as all that all along!".

Fauci wants to have his cake and eat it too. Sorry big guy, it doesn't work that way.

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