Puppet MastersS


Attention

Russia affirms Syrian sovereignty: Can't guarantee safety of Turkish aviation as Damascus closes Idlib airspace


Sputnik
Mon, 02 Mar 2020 18:17 UTC
bombing idlib turkey
© Agence France-Presse/ Abdulaziz KetazTensions run high in Syria’s Idlib after Thursday's spike in hostilities
The Russian Defence Ministry announced on Sunday that it could no longer guarantee the safety of Turkish aircraft flying over northern Syria, after Damascus moved to close the airspace over the embattled province of Idlib.

Damascus announced earlier on Sunday that it would treat any aircraft that crosses into the airspace of Syria's northwest as a hostile target.

This comes amid media reports that two Syrian aircraft were shot down in Idlib. Both pilots survived after ejecting, according to reports.

SANA reported that the "Turkish regime's terrorist forces" struck the planes, without specifying whether they were Turkish troops or Ankara-backed militants.
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Bad Guys

Erdogan's whipsaw Syrian policy: Claims Turkey now wants lasting ceasefire in Idlib


SouthFront
Mon, 02 Mar 2020 17:21 UTC
erdogan
© Presidential Press Office / Handout via REUTERSTurkish President Tayyip Erdogan
On March 2nd, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that Turkey's hope was a lasting ceasefire in Idlib, Syria and that Ankara is working towards that goal.
"My only wish is to end this struggle with victory and prevent further bloodshed, with a permanent cease-fire. For this, we are using all our diplomatic channels, along with our struggle in the field," Recep Tayyip Erdogan told a gathering of ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party officials.
His remarks came ahead of his meeting Thursday with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the situation in Idlib, northwestern Syria. The meeting is expected to take place on March 5th in Ankara.

Comment: Erdogan is looking more and more unhinged each day. At the same time he is floating ceasefire offers, he is making threats:
"We are just beginning to show our true strength to those who see our sensitivity as [the unwillingness] to shed blood, to hurt or [make someone] suffer, or as weakness and timidity," the Turkish president told members of his AK Party on Monday. "The human and equipment losses of the [Syrian] regime are just the beginning," Erdogan said.

Backing up his threat, Erdogan cited heavy losses ostensibly inflicted on the advancing Syrian government troops. He said Damascus has lost 2,557 soldiers and militia members, 135 tanks as well as dozens of cannons, multiple launch rocket systems, and pickup-mounted anti-aircraft guns.

While threatening Damascus with further attacks, Erdogan made an appeal to Moscow and Tehran, which have been supporting President Bashar Assad in his fight against terrorism.



A quick glance through @ragipsoylu's feed shows him to be a enthusiastic Turkish partisan, so presumably he approves Erdogan's threats.

Still the Turkish president has retained a bit of a grip on reality, with a switch to making nice with the Kremlin, despite his previous statements in which he ordered Russia (!) to stay out of Turkey's way in Syria. The proffered olive branch:
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has high hopes for his upcoming meeting with Vladimir Putin, saying he's optimistic an agreement will be reached with the Russian leader on ending hostilities in Idlib, Syria.

"We will evaluate the developments [in Idlib]. I hope that we [can lay the groundwork for] a ceasefire or take other steps and that we will get the job done quickly," Erdogan said in a recent speech in Ankara.

Earlier in the day, it was confirmed that Erdogan's much-anticipated visit to Moscow will take place on March 5. The Kremlin has expressed similar expectations for the meeting, saying the Putin-Erdogan summit will help defuse tensions in the troubled province of Idlib.
In the meantime, Erdogan has played the migrant card once again, opening its northern borders to Europe:
This Monday, Erdogan confirmed that Ankara will not close its borders, so the migrants can continue on into Europe. There will not be a single step back on this, Erdogan promised: "It's done, the doors are open now. You're going to have your share of this load right now."
Fierce clashes, tear gas at border as Greece vows to 'turn back' flow of migrants from Turkey

Russia has stayed the course in trying to bring some order to the area:
Russian military police have been deployed to Saraqeb in Syria's Idlib province, the Defense Ministry has confirmed. Until recently, the strategic town has seen heavy fighting between Syrian forces and Turkish-backed militants.

The police presence is especially important because of the key role that Saraqeb plays in assuring the safety of vehicles and the civilian population travelling along the M4 and M5 highways.

There was heavy fighting between Syrian government forces and the militants, who were backed by Turkish artillery, over the town in recent weeks. In late February, the jihadists even announced that they were able to get hold of Saraqeb, but the Russian military sources denied those claims, saying that all of the attacks were repelled.

The Syrian forces established full control over Saraqeb on February 5. That triggered quite a response from Ankara, which demanded Damascus draw back its forces to the positions they occupied in late 2019. It also tried persuading Moscow to pressure its Syrian allies to retreat.
Why is Erdogan so focused on Idlib? One factor resurfacing is that if Turkey loses Idlib, jurisdiction over the neighboring province of Hatay, once under Syrian governance but handed to Turkey by France in 1939, may come back into the picture:

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Propaganda

Dear mainstream media, do you really think Modi is behind all India's problems?

Ashish Shukla
RT
Sun, 01 Mar 2020 03:10 UTC
Modi
© REUTERS/Amit Dave
It's a tedious time to read Indian or Western mainstream media as it unleashes venom against PM Narendra Modi and pours scorn on ordinary people, to be gobbled up by elites. Or perhaps there's never been a better time to read it.

The negative headlines keep coming: "India's politics of hate" (Washington Post), "Millions of Indians could be in detention camps" (Bloomberg), "New Delhi turns into battleground" (New York Times). Then there's Newsweek, warning of the ruling party's agenda to "marginalize Muslims."

Without further inspection, these diatribes are guaranteed to produce anger and fear. But it could also be an occasion to brush up your primer on Western Media - and to understand why they frame stories as they do.

Of course, these stories above refer to the awful violence which erupted on New Delhi's streets over a controversial citizenship law and claimed 20 lives, even as the President of the United States Donald Trump was beaming from ear to ear over the massive welcome he received from both the masses and the Indian establishment this week.

Comment: See also:

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Bad Guys

Idlib is mine, says Erdogan: Explaining the recent Turkey-Syria clashes

Elijah J. Magnier
ejmagnier.com
Mon, 02 Mar 2020 17:35 UTC
turkey-backed militants jihadists idlib
Turkish backed jihadists and foreign fighters preparing an attack against the Syrian Army position around Idlib.
A significant development took place in Syria on Friday. A Russian attack on a Turkish convoy in Idlib in north-west Syria killed 36 Turkish soldiers and officers. In retaliation, Turkey launched an unprecedented armed drone attack that lasted several hours and resulted in the killing and wounding of over 150 Syrian officers and soldiers and their allies of Hezbollah and the Fatimiy'oun. The Turkish drones destroyed dozens of tanks and rocket launchers deployed by the Syrian Army along the front line. Russia ceased air support for Syria, and its allies demanded from Russia an explanation for the lack of coordination of its unilateral stoppage of air support, allowing the Turkish drones to kill so many Syrian Army and allied forces. What happened, why, and what will be the consequences?

In October 2018, Turkey and Russia signed an agreement in Astana to establish a de-confliction zone along the Damascus-Aleppo (M5) and Aleppo-Latakia (M4) highways. It was agreed that all belligerents would withdraw and render the roads accessible to civilian traffic. Moreover, it was decided to end the presence of all jihadists, including the Tajik, Turkistan, Uighur and all other foreign fighters present in Idlib alongside Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (former ISIS, former al-Qaeda in Syria), Hurras al-Din (al-Qaeda in Syria), and Ahrar al-Sham with their foreign fighters and all "non-moderate" rebels. Last year, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham took full control of Idlib and its rural area under the watchful eyes of Turkey.

Over a year later, the Turkish commitment to end the presence of jihadists and to open the M5 and M4 had not been respected. The Syrian Army and its allies, along with Russia, agreed to impose the Astana agreement by force. In a few weeks, the jihadists' defence line crumbled under heavy Russian bombing. According to field commanders, the jihadists left fewer than 100 men in every village, who withdrew under the heavy bombing and preferred to leave rather than be surrounded by the Syrian Army and their fast advance.

Turkey, according to the military commanders in Syria, saw the withdrawal of jihadists and decided to move thousands of troops into Syria to lead a counter-attack against the Syrian Army and its allies. This action made it impossible for Russia to distinguish between jihadists and the Turkish Army. Moreover, Turkey refrained from informing Russia - as it had agreed to according to the deconfliction agreement between Russia and Turkey - about the position of its regular forces. This was when Russia bombed a convoy killing 36 Turkish officers along with 17 jihadists who were present together with the Turkish Army.
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Target

Huawei is in the crosshairs of intense US-China struggle for global economic dominance

Mike Whitney
The Unz Reader
Fri, 21 Feb 2020 00:00 UTC
Huawei
The Trump administration's appalling treatment of Huawei shows that the United States will risk anything, even a nuclear conflagration with China, to maintain its tenuous grip on global power.

Huawei is China's behemoth technology company that has recently come under fire by the Trump administration for violating sanctions against Iran and for providing network equipment that (allegedly) poses security risks for its customers. Both charges are baseless, but they're being used as the pretext for launching a full-blown war on China's telecom-equipment giant.

Huawei's troubles stem from the fact that the company has taken the lead in fifth generation wireless technology (5-G) and left the US behind eating their dust. The situation creates an insurmountable problem for the US which wants to preserve its role as global superpower into the next century. That dream will not be realized if China dominates communications technology and continues to be the industry leader in next-generation mobile infrastructure. That's why Trump has taken off the gloves and is preparing to do whatever it takes to sabotage Huawei and prevent its cutting edge infrastructure technology from being installed around the world.

Comment: See also:

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Rocket

North Korea fires two short-range missiles into sea, says S. Korea's military


The Japan Times
Mon, 02 Mar 2020 16:29 UTC
Kim Jong Un
© KCNA / KNS / VIA AFP-JIJINorth Korean leader Kim Jong Un attends a meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea in this undated photo released Saturday.
North Korea fired what appeared to be two short-range ballistic missiles on Monday, the South's military said, weeks after Pyongyang threatened to demonstrate a "new strategic weapon" and its deadline for Washington to offer sanctions relief expired.

The launch was the nuclear-armed North's first for more than three months and came as nuclear negotiations with the United States remain at a standstill.

The two devices were fired eastward over the sea from the Wonsan area on the east coast and flew 240 kilometers (150 miles) at a maximum altitude of 35 kilometers, the South's Joint Chiefs of Staff said.

They were "believed to be short-range ballistic missiles," a JCS official said.

Comment:

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Mr. Potato

Hey, it's not just covid-19 that has the Dems' brains addled

Howard Kunstler
Clusterfuck Nation
Fri, 28 Feb 2020 00:00 UTC
Stupid democrats
Whatever the Democratic Party is infected with may be worse than covid-19. The symptoms presented point to a rare illness known as kuru. By now, we all understand that diseases easily jump between continents in this era of incessant air travel. The National Institutes of Health's MedlinePlus bulletin has this to say about it:
Kuru is found among people from New Guinea who practiced a form of cannibalism in which they ate the brains of dead people as part of a funeral ritual. This practice stopped [allegedly] in 1960, but cases of kuru were reported for many years afterward because the disease has a long incubation period.... Kuru causes brain and nervous system changes similar to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease... bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also called mad cow disease. The main risk factor for kuru is eating human brain tissue, which can contain the infectious particles.
Does this account for the public's preoccupation with Zombies? Is something deeply sinister roiling in the dark interstices of American life? The public still doesn't know for sure what was going on in the congressional SCIF chamber (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) deep in the Capitol's sub-basement back in January, where Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) was busy spirit-cooking impeachment testimony. Was something else bubbling away on his Coleman stove down there? Say, a fricassee of Jeffrey Epstein's frontal lobes? Did Nancy Pelosi come back for seconds? Her subsequent behavior implicates acute kuru infection, the inappropriate laughter, slurred speech, tardive dyskinesia, paranoia.

Comment: Aside from the ponerological effects of greed and lust for power, we have found another excellent descriptor for the collective madness that Washington has been displaying for the past how many ever years: Wetiko :

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Snakes in Suits

Lies, damned lies, and presidential debates: The rhetoric and reality of gun control

Jonathan Turley
jonathanturley.org
Sun, 01 Mar 2020 00:00 UTC
Sanders Biden
Below is my column in the Hill newspaper on the reality and rhetoric of gun control in light of promises in the Democratic primary. The fact is that many of the ideas raised by the candidates have merit but they are likely to be marginal in their impact on real gun-related fatalities.

Here is the column:

The Democratic presidential debate down in South Carolina this week has proven once again the famous line that there are "lies, damned lies, and statistics." The line is the perfect warning to the unwary about politicians citing statistics. The quote itself is widely misrepresented as the work of Mark Twain or British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, so it seems nothing can be trusted when it comes to statistics, not even quotes on statistics.

Some false statistics, however, are so facially absurd that they are indeed harmless except to the most gullible. That was the case when former Vice President Joe Biden attacked Senator Bernie Sanders over a vote that had favored the gun industry. Biden declared that, since the vote, 150 million Americans have been killed by guns. He also said the vote happened in 2007, when it was actually in 2005. Many people immediately scratched their heads, thinking they may have missed a holocaust that had claimed roughly half the population. Later, the Biden campaign insisted it was just another one of his gaffes and the real number is 150,000 Americans.
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Radar

Are Russia and Turkey on a collision course in Syria?

The Saker
The Unz Review
Fri, 28 Feb 2020 00:00 UTC
Putin Erdogan
The murder of the Iranian hero-martyr General Soleimani created a situation in which a war between Iran and the Axis of Kindness (USA/Israel/KSA) became a real possibility but, at the very last minute, Uncle Shmuel decided that he had no stomach for a full-scale war against Iran. Wise decision.

This, however, does not at all imply that the AngloZionist Empire decided to stand by idly, far from it. The need to take quick and determined action became particularly acute following the huge anti-US demonstrations in Iraq (well over one million people in the streets!) which directly put at risk the US occupation (the MSM would call it "presence") in both Iraq and Syria.

At the same time, Turkish President Erdogan's refusal to remove all the "bad terrorists" from the Idlib province eventually resulted in a joint Syrian-Russian offensive to liberate the province. That offensive, in turn, clearly infuriated the Turks who warned of a major military operation to prevent the Syrians from liberating their own country.

This begs the question: are Russia and Turkey really on a collision course?

Comment: Erdogan is playing a very dangerous and stupid game that is likely to backfire unless he stands down very soon:

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Chart Bar

Best of the Web: Bernie Sanders crowd sizes dwarf 2020 Democratic rivals, consistently drawing 10,000 to 30,000 people

Joseph Simonson
Washington Examiner
Tue, 18 Feb 2020 13:05 UTC

Comment: For comparison, Trump drew his largest crowd during the last US presidential election this week 4 years ago in Cleveland, Ohio, when an estimated 29,000 people turned up. A month later, in April 2016, around 28,300 people showed up to one of Sanders' rallies in Brooklyn Park.

For further comparison, apart from Elizabeth Warren, who had a couple of rallies with turnouts of 10-15,000 last autumn, it is rare for establishment-approved candidates for the Democratic nomination to draw more than a thousand people to their rallies.


bernie sanders rally tacoma
Bernie Sanders fills a stadium at last week's rally in Tacoma, Washington
Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign, much like President Trump, loves to boast about crowd sizes.

Having attracted tens of thousands of people to a Presidents Day event, the Vermont senator and 2020 Democrat has some bragging rights.

A press release from the Sanders campaign claimed over 50,000 cumulatively attended rallies in five states from Saturday through Friday. In addition, over 4 million viewed the livestreams of the events online, the campaign said.

"Bernie has built a multiracial, multi-generational, people-driven movement for change that has broad support across the country," Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir said in a written statement. "This is the kind of energy and excitement that will defeat Donald Trump in November and usher in the political revolution that this country badly needs."


Comment: These crowd numbers may just reflect liberal oases in a sea of Republican Red, but if that's the case, then it should also be reflected in Sanders being the Democratic nominee.

We'll get a good idea tomorrow, 'Super-Tuesday' - when some 14 states pledge their delegates behind candidates ahead of the Democratic Convention in June - if the DNC is going to rig it against Sanders like it did in 2016.

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