Puppet MastersS


Quenelle

Deadly attack on American soldiers shows Afghans want US out of their country - Tehran


RT
Sun, 09 Feb 2020 14:23 UTC
Soleimani
© Nazanin Tabatabaee/WANAIranians burn US and Israeli flags as they gather to mourn General Qassem Soleimani in Tehran
An attack that killed two US troops in Afghanistan illustrates that the American military is no longer welcome in the country, a senior Iranian adviser has said, adding that US forces will be forced out of Iraq and Syria.

Ali Akbar Velayati, a top international adviser to the leader of the Islamic Revolution, said that Saturday's incident in Nangarhar province signals that "it is time for the Americans to be expelled from Afghanistan," Iranian media reported.

The Pentagon confirmed that two US service members were killed and six others injured after an individual in "Afghan uniform" armed with a machine gun opened fire on a joint patrol in Afghanistan.

Comment: See also:

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Question

Has Modi's strong & silent approach tamed the beast of India's anti-Citizenship Act protests?

Ashish Shukla
RT
Fri, 07 Feb 2020 20:27 UTC
Narendra Modi
© Reuters/Adnan AbidiPrime Minister of India Narendra Modi
Protests against India's new Citizenship Act have hogged headlines and filled the streets for two months — but Prime Minister Narendra Modi's approach to the crisis may actually tame the beast many thought could spur his downfall.

The seemingly innocuous act, passed by parliament in December 2019, fast-forwards the citizenship process for Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Christians, Parsis, and Jains — all of which are persecuted minorities in the three neighbouring Islamic states of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. The law, however, was branded "anti-Muslim" by Modi's detractors who argue that it puts Muslims seeking to immigrate to India at an unfair disadvantage. The propaganda effort turned out to be very successful.

Comment: Could covert Western meddling be tied to China's invitation to become part of the One Belt, One Road trade initiative?

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Better Earth

Best of the Web: Mexico shows the world how to defeat neoliberalism: With publicly-owned banks outside bankster control

Ellen Brown
Web of Debt
Thu, 06 Feb 2020 00:00 UTC
Obrador
© Eneas De Troya/CC BY 2.0Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico's president
While U.S. advocates and local politicians struggle to get their first public banks chartered, Mexico's new president has begun construction on 2,700 branches of a government-owned bank to be completed in 2021, when it will be the largest bank in the country. At a press conference on Jan. 6, he said the neoliberal model had failed; private banks were not serving the poor and people outside the cities, so the government had to step in.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO) has been compared to the United Kingdom's left-wing opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, with one notable difference: AMLO is now in power. He and his left-​wing coalition won by a landslide in Mexico's 2018 general election, overturning the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that had ruled the country for much of the past century. Called Mexico's "first full-fledged left-wing experiment," AMLO's election marks a dramatic change in the political direction of the country. AMLO wrote in his 2018 book A New Hope for Mexico, "In Mexico the governing class constitutes a gang of plunderers.... Mexico will not grow strong if our public institutions remain at the service of the wealthy elites."
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Star of David

In process, won't take long: Israel maps areas of West Bank subject to extension of its sovereignty

Aleksandra Serebriakova
Sputnik
Sun, 09 Feb 2020 07:13 UTC
TrumpNeti
© Reuters/Joshua RobertsUS President Donald Trump • Israel PM Benjamin Netanyahu
In January, US President Donald Trump unveiled his long-advertised Israeli-Palestinian peace plan at a press conference attended by American and Israeli officials. The deal de-facto recognises Tel Aviv's claims to sovereignty over Israeli settlements in the West Bank, considered a violation of international law by the UN.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said his country is in the process of mapping areas of the West Bank that would be subjected to an extension of Israeli sovereignty, following the publication of US President Donald Trump's peace plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, The Times of Israel reported.

Netanyahu reportedly said during his party's campaign event on Saturday:
"We're already in the process of mapping the territory that according to the Trump plan will be part of the State of Israel. This won't take a lot of time and we'll complete this."
"Don't be mistaken, the Americans will go along with this, President Trump will go along with this," the Israeli prime minister purportedly added.

Comment: It's remarkable how a completely failed peace plan, in fact a non-starter from the get-go, is 'the authority' Netanyahu claims as the go-ahead signal to annex West Bank territory. Does Trump know he's been played?

RT, 9/2/2020: US envoy warns Washington could pull support for WB annexations
Unilateral action by Israel to annex land in the West Bank would endanger US support for a proposed blueprint for the region, US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman has said.

"Israel is subject to the completion [of] a mapping process by a joint Israeli-American committee. Any unilateral action in advance of the completion of the committee process endangers the Plan & American recognition," Friedman said, in a message posted on Twitter.
Judging by Friedman's message, it appears that Washington has taken issue with being excluded from the process, and could potentially withdraw support for the plan if Israel proceeds alone. The area being mapped includes all of Israel's illegal settlements in the Jordan Valley.

"The only map that can be accepted as the map of Palestine is the map of the Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital," said Nabil Abu Rudeinah, spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.


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Bullseye

Ex-president Walesa vows to mend Poland-Russia ties: 'Warsaw is closer to Moscow than to Washington'


RT
Sun, 09 Feb 2020 19:38 UTC
polish soldiers red sqare victory day
© REUTERS/Sergei KarpukhinHappier times: Polish soldiers march along Red Square during a Victory Day parade in 2010
It is imperative to improve Russia-Poland relations, outlive the troubled past and move forward, ex-president Lech Walesa has said, adding that only a "third party" benefits from the discord.

While the relationship between Poland and Russia wasn't particularly warm throughout recent decades, it can be unfrozen if both sides do their part, Walesa told Russia's Sobesednik weekly.

"Even now, these relations can be made good," the former president said.
When we quarrel, only third parties win. Warsaw was always closer to Moscow than to Washington.

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Red Flag

Committee chairmen say redacted footnotes contradict statements claimed in IG report on FBI's Trump surveillance

Petr Svab
The Epoch Times
Fri, 07 Feb 2020 19:08 UTC
Chuck Grassley
© Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch TimesSen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) during a Senate Judiciary hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on Oct. 22, 2019.
The chairmen of two U.S. Senate committees are disputing claims made by an FBI official to the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General (OIG), saying the claims are contradicted by four classified footnotes in a recent OIG report that delved into FBI's surveillance of Trump 2016 presidential campaign aides.

The report, released Dec. 9, 2019, found "17 significant errors or omissions" in a surveillance warrant and its three renewals the FBI took out on one of the aides, Carter Page, under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 2016 and 2017 (pdf).

The senators, Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) of the Senate Finance Committee and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, asked Attorney General William Barr to declassify the footnotes, which have been mostly redacted in the public version of the OIG report.

The senators have access to the unredacted version.

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Dollar

Buttigieg skirts anti-corruption laws by campaigning with 'dark money' group

Donald Shaw
Sludge
Fri, 07 Feb 2020 17:46 UTC
pete buttigieg
© Getty Images


Despite ban on coordination between PACs and campaign, Pete Buttigieg appeared at an event hosted by a "dark money" affiliate of a super PAC that is backing him.

After appearing to attempt to dodge an anti-corruption regulation earlier in the week, the campaign of South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg has again tested the limits of campaign finance law.

Buttigieg spoke at an event on Thursday in Merrimack, New Hampshire, that was organized, at least in part, by VoteVets Action Fund, the "dark money" affiliate of VoteVets PAC, which has spent more than $1.4 million on television and digital ads to boost Buttigieg's candidacy.
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Info

'We have a racist society from top to bottom': Sanders interrupts candidates fighting over who has more of the black vote

Mary Margaret Olohan
Daily Caller
Fri, 07 Feb 2020 22:19 UTC
Bernie Sanders
© Reuters / Elizabeth Frantz / FileBernie Sanders
2020 presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders said Friday that "we have a racist society from top to bottom."

The Vermont senator spoke Friday evening at ABC's Democratic debate in New Hampshire, where he discussed racism in the United States as former Vice President Joe Biden and billionaire Tom Steyer argued over who has more support from black voters.

"We have a racist society from top to bottom," Sanders said, adding that this "racist society" is "impacting health care, housing, criminal justice, education — you name it."

Comment: It's rather mind-boggling that Sanders and other Democratic candidates feel it's a winning strategy to continually tell the American people that they're racist.

See also:

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USA

Lessons from Iowa

James Corbett
Corbett Report
Sat, 08 Feb 2020 19:00 UTC
Iowa Lessons
© Corbett Report
In case you missed this week's insanity in Iowa (and if you did, good for you!), here is the entire debacle in one ridiculously long run-on sentence:

The Iowa Democratic Party thought it would be a really swell idea to set the tone of the Democratic primary season by using their first-in-the-nation, widely touted, closely watched caucuses as a testing ground for a new election result reporting app called Shadow created by a shadowy organization called Acronym funded by a Silicon Valley billionaire known for online false flag operations in American elections and staffed by old hands of the Obama and Clinton campaigns, and which "glitched" (because of course) leading to "irregularities" in reporting and an overnight delay as the results were manually re-tabulated (giving the internet peanut gallery a chance to marvel at the Iowa Democrats' version of a coin toss) and, eventually, to the declaration (in spite of massive lingering inconsistencies in the data) that, in complete opposition to all polling so far, Pete "#MayorCheat" Buttigieg was in fact the Iowan people's choice for the Democratic presidential nominee . . . at least until they learned basic biographical details about him.

Or, more simply: the Iowa Democratic caucuses was a sh*tshow this year. It's almost enough to make me feel sorry for all those credulous souls who still believe in the holy sacrament of voting.

. . . Almost.

Although no one — not even the most fluoride-addled, election-participating statist — can deny that this past week has been a failure of epic proportions, we should not lose sight of the fact that this fiasco can also be instructive. After all, it teaches us something about the system that purports to rule over the 300 million+ citizens of the United States. And, more importantly, it teaches us something about the political process itself that, one way or another, defines the world that we all live in.

So, allow me to present five important lessons from the Iowa caucuses that (SIGH) absolutely no one will learn.
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Arrow Up

US oil sanctions on Iran push India into massive supply deal with Russia

Shishir Upadhyaya
RT
Sun, 09 Feb 2020 03:26 UTC
Rosneft
© REUTERS / ILYA NAYMUSHINOil refinery owned by Rosneft in Krasnoyarsk Region, Russia
Escalating US pressure on Iran, including sanctions targeting Iranian oil exports, may have had an unexpected consequence - pushing India to diversify its energy supplies by shifting from Tehran to Moscow as a major oil supplier.

State-owned oil refiner Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) has just signed a contract with Russia's Rosneft for the supply of up to 2 million tons of oil by the end of 2020. The meeting took place on the sidelines of India's largest weapons fair, DefExpo, currently going on in Lucknow.

"This is just the beginning," Indian Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan told reporters after meeting with Rosneft chairman Igor Sechin in New Delhi on Wednesday.

Comment: See also:

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