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Bizarro Earth

Best of the Web: The Saker: President Macron makes an amazing admission about Western geopolitics

The Saker
The Unz Reader
Thu, 12 Sep 2019 00:00 UTC
Emmanuel Macron
I don't know whether the supposedly Chinese curse really comes from China, but whether it does or not, we most certainly are cursed with living in some truly interesting times: Iran won the first phase of the "tanker battle" against the AngloZionists, Putin offered to sell Russian hypersonic missiles to Trump (Putin has been trolling western leaders a lot lately) while Alexander Lukashenko took the extreme measure of completely shutting down the border between the Ukraine and Belarus due to the huge influx of weapons and nationalist extremists from the Ukraine. As he put it himself "if weapons fall into the hands of ordinary people and especially nationalist-minded people, wait for terrorism". He is quite right, of course. Still, there is a sweet irony here, or call it karma if you prefer, but for the Ukronazis who promised their people a visa-free entrance into the EU (for tourism only, and if you have money to spend, but still...), and yet 5 years into that obscene experiment of creating a rabidly russophobic Ukraine and 100 days (or so) into Zelenskii's presidency, we have the Ukraine's closest and most supportive neighbor forced to totally shut down its border due to the truly phenomenal toxicity of the Ukrainian society! But, then again, the Ukraine is such a basket-case that we can count on "most interesting" things (in the sense of the Chinese curse, of course) happening there too.

Interestingly, one of the people the Ukrainians gave up in this exchange was Vladimir Tsemakh, a native of the Donbass who was kidnapped by the Ukie SBU in Novorussia (our noble "Europeans" did not object to such methods!) and declared the "star witness" against Russia in the MH-17 (pseudo-)investigation. Even more pathetic is that the Dutch apparently fully endorsed this load of crapola. Finally, and just for a good laugh, check out how the infamous' Bellingcat presented Tsemakh. And then, suddenly, everybody seem to "forget" that "star witness" and now the Ukies have sent him to Russia. Amazing how fast stuff gets lost in the collective western memory hole...
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Chess

India PM on Trump joining him at "howdy, Modi" event in Texas

Deepshikha Ghosh
NDTV
Mon, 16 Sep 2019 21:23 UTC
trump modi india texas
'Howdy, Modi': PM Narendra Modi will address people in Texas, where Donald Trump will join him
Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted today that he was "delighted" that US President Donald Trump would join him at the 'Howdy, Modi' event in Houston on September 22, and called it a "special gesture". White House officials have been quoted as telling the Press Trust of India that when PM Modi requested a joint address in France last month on the sidelines of the G7 summit, the US president "immediately accepted" it.

"A special gesture by @POTUS, signifying the special friendship between India and USA! Delighted that President @realDonaldTrump will join the community programme in Houston on the 22nd. Looking forward to joining the Indian origin community in welcoming him at the programme," tweeted PM Modi, hours after the White House confirmed that President Trump would drop in.

Comment: So is Modi making nice with Trump to get a break in the tariff war he is waging on many trading partners? Is Trump aiming to show Modi the strength of his base in Texas? Will the Pakistan-India dispute over Kashmir create problems in terms of demonstrations? Is Trump aiming to counterbalance India's friendliness with Russia? It should be a pretty interesting event, and bears close watching.

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Whistle

Ship smuggling diesel fuel to UAE seized - Iran


RFE/RL
Mon, 16 Sep 2019 13:27 UTC
iran tanker
© AP Photo / Tasnim News Agency / Morteza AkhoondiIn this Sunday, July 21, 2019 photo, an aerial view shows a speedboat of Iran's Revolutionary Guard moving around the British-flagged oil tanker Stena Impero which was seized in the Strait of Hormuz on Friday by the Guard, in the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas
Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) says it has seized a ship in the Persian Gulf, accusing it of smuggling diesel fuel to the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.).

An IRGC commander said on September 16 that the vessel was carrying 250,000 liters of fuel when it was detained near Iran's Greater Tunb island, according to official media.

The ship was sailing from Bandar Lengeh toward U.A.E. waters, Brigadier General Ali Ozmayi was quoted as saying.

The vessel's 11 crew members have been detained, Ozmayi added, without saying when it happened or giving their nationality.

Comment: See also:

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Light Sabers

Alleged photo of Hezbollah's 'new anti-ship missile' surfaces as US destroyer docks in Beirut as a "security reminder"


Sputnik
Mon, 16 Sep 2019 18:52 UTC
Hezbollah
© AP Photo / Bilal Hussein
The US Navy's guided missile destroyer USS Ramage became the first US warship to dock at a Lebanese port in decades on Saturday, with the US Embassy calling the port visit a "security reminder" of the US Navy's constant presence off the Mediterranean country's coast amid boiling tensions between Hezbollah and the Israeli military.

A photo has appeared online purporting to show a 'new' anti-ship missile with the Hezbollah logo emblazoned on its front half.

According to @South_thaer, the Twitter user allegedly affiliated with Hezbollah who posted a picture of the missile, the weapon was capable of "destroying all military battleships of any kind, and annihilating all onboard."

Comment: See also:

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Quenelle - Golden

Best of the Web: ECHR rules Browder's claims about Magnitsky being corruption whistleblower "manifestly ill-founded"

Craig Murray
craigmurray.org.uk
Mon, 16 Sep 2019 20:00 UTC
magnitsky browder
The Russian govt was found responsible for his death in prison, but the European Court ruled Magnitsky absolutely should have been there. His boss, meanwhile, remains at large...
The conscientious judges of the European Court of Human Rights published a judgement a fortnight ago which utterly exploded the version of events promulgated by Western governments and media in the case of the late Mr Magnitskiy. Yet I can find no truthful report of the judgement in the mainstream media at all.

The myth is that Magnitskiy was an honest rights campaigner and accountant who discovered corruption by Russian officials and threatened to expose it, and was consequently imprisoned on false charges and then tortured and killed. A campaign over his death was led by his former business partner, hedge fund manager Bill Browder, who wanted massive compensation for Russian assets allegedly swindled from their venture. The campaign led to the passing of the Magnitskiy Act in the United States, providing powers for sanctioning individuals responsible for human rights abuses, and also led to matching sanctions being developed by the EU.

However the European Court of Human Rights has found, in judging a case brought against Russia by the Magnitskiy family, that the very essence of this story is untrue. They find that there was credible evidence that Magnitskiy was indeed engaged in tax fraud, in conspiracy with Browder, and he was rightfully charged. The ECHR also found there was credible evidence that Magnitskiy was indeed a flight risk so he was rightfully detained. And most crucially of all, they find that there was credible evidence of tax fraud by Magnitskiy and action by the authorities "years" before he started to make counter-accusations of corruption against officials investigating his case.

Comment: Browder's story is blown out of the water by this ruling, yet he's STILL giving MSM interviews about how this ruling proves him right!

Unbelievable.

See also:

Alex Krainer: Why I Wrote Grand Deception - The Truth About Bill Browder

The Truth Perspective: Bill Browder, the Magnitsky Act, and anti-Russia Sanctions: Interview with Alex Krainer

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Propaganda

Propaganda alert: Russia carried out a 'stunning' breach of FBI communications system, escalating the spy game on U.S. soil

Zach Dorfman, Jenna McLaughlin and Sean D. Naylor
Yahoo
Mon, 16 Sep 2019 20:00 UTC
putin and trump
© AP, Getty Images



Comment: Unnamed intelligence sources are back at it again with the Russia hysteria. They should charge Russia rent for all the space it takes up in their heads. The reality is that, in this article, the main evidence for what they uncovered being garden variety espionage is the 3 years they sat on it - and throughout Russiagate at that. If there truly was some incendiary evidence, it would have been revealed way before now.

The dastardly doings of the Russians is rather common or garden variety spying. The Russians are probably doing it mainly to sow suspicion and doubt among the US intel types as can be seen by this statement:
"We came to the conclusion that they were trying to get into our heads," the former senior official said.
Messing with American intel is pretty easy to do; just have some diplomatic plate cars hang around outside Langley and the FBI HQ. That whole "tech" to intercept FBI communications and collect data from non-networked computers is stuff that the US intel types have been using for quite a while! Yet the article portrays it as some kind of awesome new tech that the Russians developed.

The references in the article to "interference in the elections" is complete horsehockey, as most people with two firing neurons know. The thing is, at this point (again as we know) the US NEEDS Russia to be "spying all over the USA", because the US intel community is a hungry insatiable beast that wants ever more money. How they gonna get that without a boogey man? As it says in the article:
"Revelations about the Russian compromise of the radio systems, recalled a former senior intelligence official, "kick-started the money flowing" to upgrade security."
While the US intel types willfully clutch their pearls about delusional Russian interference in order to bilk ever more money from taxpayers and keep ever tighter control over them, Russia is busy remaking the most important part of the world (Eurasia) in their own image.


On Dec. 29, 2016, the Obama administration announced that it was giving nearly three dozen Russian diplomats just 72 hours to leave the United States and was seizing two rural East Coast estates owned by the Russian government. As the Russians burned papers and scrambled to pack their bags, the Kremlin protested the treatment of its diplomats, and denied that those compounds — sometimes known as the "dachas" — were anything more than vacation spots for their personnel.

The Obama administration's public rationale for the expulsions and closures — the harshest U.S. diplomatic reprisals taken against Russia in several decades — was to retaliate for Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. But there was another critical, and secret, reason why those locations and diplomats were targeted.
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Target

Bring it on! Conservatives itching to re-fight the sham Kavanaugh war

Guy Benson
Townhall
Mon, 16 Sep 2019 10:25 UTC
Brett M. Kavanaugh
© Win McNamee/APUS Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh
The vitriolic and disgraceful confirmation battle over US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was thrust back into the news cycle over the weekend, as two New York Times reporters who covered last year's political melee are previewing their forthcoming book on the subject. Leftists are expressing dutiful outrage over a "new" allegation against Kavanaugh, revealed publicly for the first time in a Times story about the co-authors' work. To the surprise of nobody who witnessed how Democrats, left-wing activists, and their allies in the mainstream media operated throughout the bruising 2018 fight, this latest development comes with a giant, flashing asterisk: Not only is there zero evidence of the new accusation, the supposed female "victim" herself reportedly cannot recall or corroborate the incident. Over to you, Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino, whose book on Kavanaugh you actually should read:

Comment: According to Daily Caller, 16/9/2019:
The Washington Post passed on a thinly sourced, unproven allegation about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh before the New York Times published it in a misleading article in Sunday's paper that has since been corrected.

The Post "last year confirmed that two intermediaries" had passed along Stier's claim "to lawmakers and the FBI" but "did not publish a story in part because the intermediaries declined to identify the alleged witness [Stier] and because the woman who was said to be involved declined to comment," the Post's article said.
See also:

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Yoda

Best of the Web: Putin quotes Koran on peace and brotherhood at summit in Turkey with Rouhani and Erdogan


RT
Mon, 16 Sep 2019 15:53 UTC
Rouhani, Erdogan,Putin
© Sputnik/Valery Melnikov/Kremlin via ReutersHassan Rouhani of Iran • Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey • Vladimir Putin of Russia
The presidents of Russia, Iran and Turkey are meeting for talks centered on resolving the conflict in Syria. This is the first international public appearance of Hassan Rouhani as Iran is accused of Saudi Arabia attack by US.

During their meeting in Ankara on Monday, Presidents Vladimir Putin, Hassan Rouhani and Recep Erdogan - of Russia, Iran and Turkey respectively - talked about progress in the Syrian conflict, as well as ways to finally end fighting in the Idlib Province, one of the last rebel strongholds in the country.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said that Syria's "sovereignty, its territorial integrity, its independence" must be respected as the parties search for an end to the conflict, which he said cannot be done with a "military solution."

He also noted that "Syrians themselves" should decide on what future they want, and rejected attempts at "regime change" in the country.
"Today, after almost nine years, with all the experience we've gathered, we still believe that the regime change - which is a position held by some countries - is no longer viable. This crisis, and other crises in the region should be settled only by peaceful means, and by the people of these countries themselves."

Comment: Putin went on to quote the Koran, to the delight of his Sunni and Shia counterparts...
Putin introduced a particular line from the Muslim holy book, known as the Surah al-Imran.

"And remember the favor of Allah upon you - when you were enemies and He brought your hearts together and you became, by His favor, brothers," the Russian president quoted.
He was on a roll, so he didn't stop there...
Putin also referenced another Koranic teaching, about how violence is only legitimate in self-defense, to semi-jokingly suggest that Saudi Arabia should buy Russian air defense systems, as Iran and Turkey have already done.

"Saudi Arabia needs to make a smart decision, as Iran did by buying our S-300, and as Mr. Erdogan did by deciding to buy the most advanced S-400 Triumph air defense systems from Russia. These kinds of systems are capable of defending any kind of infrastructure in Saudi Arabia from any kind of attack."
Slowly, slowly, catchee monkee!

What a legend.

UPDATE 17 Sept 2019

Here's the footage of Putin trolling the US-Saudi Patriot air defense system:


Nobody Kremlin-trolls like the troll in the Kremlin. Hail to the CHIEF!

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Star of David

Israel's two elections, one apartheid state

Ariel Gold
Common Dreams
Sun, 15 Sep 2019 00:00 UTC
Neti-Trump poster
© Amir Levy/Getty ImagesNetanyahu campaign poster with President Trump
Israelis are getting ready to head to the polls for the second time in 2019. Israel's last national elections were five months ago in April, ending in a razor-tight finish with Netanyahu's Likud party winning 35 Knesset seats and the Blue and White party winning 35 Knesset seats. The remaining 50 Knesset seats were won by smaller parties, with the majority going to right and far-right parties that had previously been in a coalition government with Likud. Netanyahu was awarded a continuation of his Prime Ministership and tasked with forming a coalition.

Unexpectedly, after more than a month of failed negotiations — the unresolvable issue was whether Israel's ultra-Orthodox population would continue to be exempted from military conscription — for the first time in Israel's history no post-election government was successfully formed. On May 30, the Knesset was again dissolved and another snap election scheduled for Tuesday, September 17.

Much of this second round of election campaigning is a repeat of what that took place in the runoff to the April vote. The two main contenders remain, Benjamin Netanyahu — as of this year Israel's longest-serving prime minister — and former IDF general Benny Gantz of the "centrist" Blue and White party. Like the lead-up to April's election, both campaigns have been rife with racist incitement.
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X

Cavusoglu lambasts Netanyahu for annexation remarks

Tugrul Cam, Ali Murat Alhas
aa.com.tr
Sun, 15 Sep 2019 00:00 UTC
Cavusoglu
© unknownTurkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu
Israeli premier Netanyahu expressed his intention to annex large parts of occupied lands in West Bank

Turkish foreign minister on Sunday dubbed as "embarrassing" the Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu's intention to annex large parts of occupied lands in the West Bank. Mevlut Cavusoglu was speaking at the emergency meeting of foreign ministers of Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) held in Saudi Arabia's Jeddah.

"This embarrassing statement is a vile attempt to win a few more votes in the coming election at the expense of destroying the hopes of [achieving] a lasting peace in the Middle East," Cavusoglu said.

Earlier this week, Netanyahu, appealing to his voters ahead of polls slated for Sept. 17, said: "I announce my intention to apply Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea, if the Israeli citizens elect me."

Comment: More from Sputnik, 15/9/2019: Turkey: Israel is 'turning into racist, apartheid regime' amid upcoming West Bank annex plans
Cavusoglu criticised what he felt was the weak reaction by other Muslim nations. "If the whole Muslim community had reacted together, the reckless plans, policies and behaviour of the United States and Israel would never have reached this point," the foreign minister said.

Cavusoglu's remarks echoed comments he made last week, in which he accused the Israeli prime minister of giving "illegal, unlawful and aggressive" pledges ahead of the 17 September elections, and promised that Turkey would "defend the rights and interests of our Palestinian brothers and sisters till the end."

Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi warned, meanwhile, that Netanyahu's pledge could "push the whole region toward violence."

Saudi Arabia similarly condemned the plans, saying Netanyahu's remarks were "a very dangerous escalation against the Palestinian people."

Iran, meanwhile, accused Netanyahu of engaging in populism in a bid to "get votes and stay in power."


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