Puppet MastersS


Whistle

EU and China oppose and will ignore US sanctions against Iranian Foreign Minister

zarif EU
© AFP 2019 / HANS PUNZ
The European Union regrets US decision to impose sanctions against Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and intends to keep working with him, Carlos Martin Ruiz de Gordejuela, the spokesman of the European Commission for the international cooperation and development, said Thursday.

"We regret this decision, and from our side, we will continue to work with Mr Zarif as Iran's most senior diplomat, and in view of the importance of maintaining diplomatic channels", the spokesman told reporters.

At the same time, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying also slammed Washington's decision.

Comment: Actions like this just shows how petty, bipolar, desperate and lacking in diplomacy the US really is - as if anybody really needed any more proof:


Airplane

Malaysian govt says it again: No proof Russia was behind MH17

Eksperti optužili Ukrajinu za falsifikovanje dokaza o padu aviona MH17
The Malaysian authorities say they have not received full details of the investigation from the countries concerned and suspected its veracity.

Malaysian Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah has called on the international community to dismiss the unfounded accusations against Russia of the MH17 crash, Izvestya reported.

According to the diplomat, ongoing investigations worry Kuala Lumpur. Malaysia requests access to all information obtained by the countries involved in the investigations.

The minister also called for investigations to be opened, while investigating countries denied Malaysian representatives full participation in the investigation.

Saifuddin fears that some investigation data will be hidden from Malaysia.

Although the investigations have not yet been completed, some Western countries have already [pronounced guilt], the minister recalled.

Comment: Just the fact that they will not share data with Malaysia should raise eyebrows. What do they have to hide? Well, Malaysia has shown every indication that they want an ACTUAL investigation. In other words, they are not willing to frame Russia, which all the other countries party to the investigation are more than willing to do. Therefore, Malaysia cannot see all the 'evidence'. Allowing that would rule out being able to easily manufacture a verdict to their liking. And it's not just that they're hiding evidence - they're refusing evidence that might contradict their pre-written narrative:
Dutch investigators refused to accept potentially groundbreaking new material in the MH17 case from German private investigator Josef Resch, and did not account for his material in their presentation on the case last month, Resch has said.

According to the investigator, his material was rejected by the Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT) after he asked to make it public.

Resch said his materials included important new information, including audio recordings about air traffic in the area on the day of the incident, recordings of the communications of Ukrainian servicemen, recordings related to Russian President Vladimir Putin's flight from Brazil to Moscow on the day of the crash, personal recordings of pilots about the incident, and other evidence.

None of this information was used in JIT's June presentation, which reiterated earlier claims about MH17 being 'downed by a Russian-made Buk missile', the investigator said.

"Our highest possible security, if it can be guaranteed at all, can be ensured with a public statement, along with the disclosure of information to the JIT and the prosecutor," Resch insisted, clarifying that he wants to see a public disclosure of his information out of fear for his life after receiving multiple death threats for his research.

The investigator said he was prepared to reveal the name of his source to JIT investigators, and provide them with other important information, including alleged secret documents previously thought destroyed containing the notes of unnamed high-ranking officials and politicians, and intelligence agents, as well as "extra documents" whose contents he said he could not discuss out of concerns for his safety.

The JIT has yet to to respond to Resch, while Dutch prosecutors wrote him a letter saying his offer would be "taken into consideration," but adding that his request to make the information public was "very unusual" and capable of "damaging" the probe. Prosecutors advised him to appeal to German prosecutors instead.

In the letter, seen by Sputnik, Dutch prosecutors told Resch that he could send his material to the JIT via a special online form.

Resch has been investigating the MH17 disaster since 2014 in his capacity as a private investigator.



Arrow Down

Rachel 'Russia!' Maddow's ratings tank after her obsessive collusion narrative implodes

rachel maddow
Once a shining beacon of hope for Russiagate true believers, it looks like Rachel Maddow has left her best days behind her; MSNBC's conspiracy queen has seen her show plummet to fifth place in cable news ratings. What happened?

You rise fast and fall hard in the fickle world of television. Just last April, Maddow overtook Fox News' Sean Hannity to claim the title of most-watched host across cable news. She had become a reliable source for Russigate aficionados to get their daily dose of crazy.

Sadly for Maddow, the latest data released by Nielsen shows her show in fifth place with a total audience of 2.4877 million viewers for July - behind Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and The Five (all Fox News shows).

For context, in January this year, Maddow still boasted an audience of nearly 3.3 million, which means she shed around 800,000 viewers in just six months. Maddow was also in fifth place among viewers in the 25-54 age range - the group most-favored by advertisers.

Ouch.

Once dubbed "the smartest person on TV" by Forbes (really), this is certainly not the big payoff Maddow was expecting, having dedicated three years of her career to breathlessly covering every twist and turn in the anticlimactic Trump-Russia "collusion" drama.

USA

Tulsi's right: Kamala Harris is a drug warrior and dirty prosecutor - UPDATES

kamala and tulsi
© CNN
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) "put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana," said Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) during Wednesday night's Democratic presidential debate.

In its promotional framing and question, CNN pushed hard for another showdown between Harris and former vice president Joe Biden. But the more authentic and substantial spat so far came between Harris and Gabbard.

Responding to Biden, Harris said she was proud of the work she did as attorney general of California, positioning her efforts as a matter of cleaning up policies put in place by people like the former VP. (Biden had just taken a well-deserved takedown from New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker about his "tough on crime" rhetoric.)

But Gabbard wouldn't let this revisionist history stand.

Comment: See also:
UPDATE: Thursday 1st August 2019


RT goes into more detail about Tulsi's takedown and Twitter's apparent trend rigging:
Gabbard dominated Google searches for the entire country following the Democratic primary debates on Wednesday, buoyed by her confrontation with California Senator Harris, who has downplayed her "tough-on-crime" record as the state's attorney general in favor of a warmer, fuzzier progressive look.


"When you were in a position to make a difference or an impact in people's lives, you did not," the Hawaii congresswoman said, pointing to Harris' reactionary pursuit of low-level drug offenders and her controversial decision to keep prisoners locked up in order to use them to fight California's deadly wildfires.


CNN gave Harris two chances to respond, but she was unable to deny Gabbard's claims, merely insisting she had "done the work" of reforming the state's criminal justice system and defending her record in vague terms.


Despite topping the Google list, some users on Twitter noticed Gabbard's name wasn't among the top trends for them. "Why did you remove Tulsi from trending @Twitter?" one user asked.



Shortly after, she did briefly appear at the top, though only with her first name, and closely followed by 'Assad,' for Syrian President Bashar Assad - 'Assad apologist' being the establishment's go-to rebuke against Gabbard. In fact, it was used as a desperate attempt at deflection by Harris' press secretary, who spent the debate tweeting about Assad.


Whether Twitter tried to 'shadow-ban' Gabbard or not, her message has been suppressed by Big Tech before: She is suing Google for inexplicably removing her ads for several hours following the first round of debates, when her name was also the most-searched. The ads remained in place this time.

Deepening the mystery, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey donated $5,600 to Gabbard's campaign - the maximum individual donation - the day after the first round of debates, triggering a backlash from his establishment media pals.
Twitter deems that Harris was "destroyed" in the debates:
Twitter deemed presidential hopeful Kamala Harris utterly "destroyed," after fellow candidate Tulsi Gabbard landed dizzying verbal haymakers on the former California prosecutor. Naturally, 'Russian bots' were swiftly blamed.

Wednesday night's Democratic debate was not an enjoyable one for Harris, who went into the faceoff as a darling of the media and among the frontrunners for her party's nomination. On the stage in Detroit, Hawaiian Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard grilled Harris on her record as California's attorney general.

In under a minute, Gabbard shredded Harris to pieces for jailing more than 1,500 nonviolent marijuana offenders while admitting in a radio interview that she had smoked marijuana in college, and for her "tough-on-crime" stances. "She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row... she kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor... and she fought to keep the cash bail system in place," Gabbard continued, leaving Harris unable to counter.

By Thursday morning, "#KamalaHarrisDestroyed" was trending on Twitter in the US.




Of course, any attack on an establishment Democrat is met with an equal and opposite reaction. Establishment pundits and their supporters responded with a familiar cry: "Russia!" Gabbard, they said, is propped up by Vladimir Putin, and #KamalaHarrisDestroyed is the work of "Putin's bots and paid for shills."


Even Harris' press secretary, Ian Sams, labeled Gabbard's supporters part of "the Russian propaganda machine."

It's worth noting that nobody shouting "Russian bots" did any data analysis to support their claims. Few noted too that, during the debate, 'Tulsi Gabbard' was the most searched for politician in every single US state, according to Google Trends.

But if the nefarious hashtag wasn't the work of the Kremlin, then it must have been the work of the MAGA-hatted deplorables, some #resistance commenters argued.


That opponents would default to Russia to attack Gabbard is unsurprising. Running on an anti-interventionist, foreign-policy-focused platform, Gabbard has been accused of cosying up to Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad for her opposition to military action in Syria and for meeting with Assad in Damascus. That stance alone led to accusations that she was more closely aligned with the position of the Kremlin than that of the White House.

At present, Gabbard is a long-shot candidate, and is polling at around one percent.
The Hill notes that Harris' spokesman is blaming a now debunked conspiracy theory pushed by the Washington establishment for her pitiful performace:
[...]

Harris had a lively performance during Wednesday night's debate, clashing once again with former Vice President Joe Biden and others on the issues of "Medicare for All," busing and other topics.

The #KamalaHarrisDestroyed hashtag had disappeared from the list of trending U.S. terms by 9:30 a.m. Thursday.

Harris's spokesman, Ian Sams, responded to the hashtag, noting that at least some of the accounts promoting it appeared to be bots.

"The Russian propaganda machine that tried to influence the 2016 election is now promoting the presidential aspirations of a controversial Hawaii Democrat," he said.





Black Cat 2

Think Marianne Williamson is weird? Conventional politicians are infinitely worse

Marianne Williamson debate
© CNNMarianne Williamson
Night one of the CNN Democratic debates has come and gone, and if you missed it you didn't miss much. Basically the entire thing can be summed up as Jake Tapper asking the progressives on stage, "So explain why Americans would vote for your policies when we here at CNN have been telling them for years that they're not allowed to support those policies?" Then for balance they ask one of the boring centrist candidates to explain why Bernie Sanders is crazy. Repeat for two and a half hours.

Disrupting the monotony was Marianne Williamson, who once again was the most-searched candidate following the debate. She raised eyebrows by using the phrase "dark psychic forces" to describe Trump's demagoguery, prompting many ironically ironic tweets from ironically ironic people eager to make fun of how weird and ridiculous this self-help guru woman is.

Which to me is a bit odd seeing as the people she's being compared to are status quo politicians, who are some of the most freakishly insane creatures on this planet.

Coffee

Trump admits some content he retweets causes 'problems' for the White House

Trump Twitter
"If I got fair coverage I wouldn't even have to tweet. It's my only form of defense," Trump said.
President Trump said Tuesday that some of the accounts or content that he retweets from his @realDonaldTrump handle can end up being a "problem" for the White House.

During an interview with C-SPAN political editor Steve Scully, the president argued that he did not regret any of the tweets he personally wrote, but demurred when it came to content from other accounts when asked whether he regretted any of his account's roughly 43,000 messages.

"Not much, honestly not much," Trump said. "I sent the one about the 'wiretapping' ... and that turned out to be true."

"A lot of the times the bigger problem is the retweets," he continued. "You know, you retweet something that sounds good but it turns out to be from a player that's not the best player in the world. And that sort of causes a problem."

Comment: The video interview:




Newspaper

'Tory MPs do not care about poor people or NHS, and people know this' - PM Johnson's senior advisor

Dominic Cummings
© youtubeDominic Cummings says Tory MPs 'don't care about the NHS' in 2017 – video
Voters are right to think Tory MPs largely do not care about poorer people or the NHS, according to Dominic Cummings in comments that have emerged from two years ago.

Boris Johnson's new senior adviser and a key architect of Brexit gave his damning view on Conservative MPs at a conference in 2017, where he said: "People think, and by the way I think most people are right: 'The Tory party is run by people who basically don't care about people like me.'

"That is what most people in the country have thought about the Tory party for decades. I know a lot of Tory MPs and I am sad to say the public is basically correct. Tory MPs largely do not care about these poorer people. They don't care about the NHS. And the public has kind of cottoned on to that."

Comment: The rapidly deteriorating quality of life for the majority of citizens is a testament to what those in power really have in mind for the country: Also check out SOTT radio's: NewsReal #26: Globalization vs Nationalism - The Hidden Causes of The Yellow Vest Protests in France


No Entry

Coralling Trump and BoJo: US Senators threaten to block trade deal with Britain if Brexit imperils open Irish border

johnson trump
© Kevin Lamarque/ReutersDonald Trump with Boris Johnson in 2017. Trump has promised the two countries could strike 'a very substantial trade agreement'.
Any future US-UK trade deal would almost certainly be blocked by the US Congress if Brexit affects the Irish border and jeopardises peace in Northern Ireland, congressional leaders and diplomats have warned.

Boris Johnson has presented a trade deal with the US as a way of offsetting the economic costs of leaving the EU, and Donald Trump promised the two countries could strike "a very substantial trade agreement" that would increase trade "four or five times".

Trump, however, would not be able to push an agreement through a hostile Congress, where there would be strong bipartisan opposition to any UK trade deal in the event of a threat to the 1998 Good Friday agreement, and to the open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic.

Comment: There is always going to be something that politicians will use to prevent Brexit going ahead - because it was never meant to - and this is just another to add to the list: Also check out SOTT radio's:


TV

Russian embassy in Syria back online after unexplained Twitter ban

Russian Syrian
© Reuters / Omar SanadikiFILE PHOTO: A Russian soldier and Syrian woman wave their countries' flags in the Syrian city of Homs
Russia's embassy in Damascus is back on Twitter, after it had its account temporarily suspended. The reasoning behind the short-lived ban is still unclear.

The embassy celebrated the reinstatement of tweeting rights on Wednesday evening, with staff thanking supporters for raising awareness about the ban. "Stay with us and encourage your friends to join," the account tweeted, "as further on in such surcumstances (sic) we'll need much stronger backup."

Earlier, the embassy's account was abruptly suspended, with Twitter giving no explanation, save for a note that it "suspends accounts which violate the Twitter Rules." The suspension did, however, come after the embassy posted a video criticizing the controversial 'White Helmets,' a Syrian civil-defense organization supposedly linked to jihadist rebels and terror organizations like Al-Qaeda.

Comment: The empire has little defense against truth and so has to resort to outright censorship:


Snakes in Suits

James Comey's next reckoning is imminent — this time for leaking

Comey
© REUTERS/Kevin LamarqueFormer FBI director James Comey
The Justice Department's chief watchdog is preparing a damning report on James Comey's conduct in his final days as FBI director that likely will conclude he leaked classified information and showed a lack of candor after his own agency began looking into his feud with President Trump over the Russia probe.

Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz's team referred Comey for possible prosecution under the classified information protection laws, but Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecutors working for Attorney General William Barr reportedly have decided to decline prosecution — a decision that's likely to upset Comey's conservative critics.

Prosecutors found the IG's findings compelling but decided not to bring charges because they did not believe they had enough evidence of Comey's intent to violate the law, according to multiple sources.

The concerns stem from the fact that one memo that Comey leaked to a friend specifically to be published by the media — as he admitted in congressional testimony — contained information classified at the lowest level of "confidential," and that classification was made by the FBI after Comey had transmitted the information, the sources said.