Puppet MastersS


Stock Down

Russia liquidates more of its US debt holdings & invests money in gold

US dollar
© Sputnik/Natalia Seliverstova
The Central Bank of Russia has continued getting rid of US Treasury bonds in August. The share of Russian investments in American debt is getting close to zero.

Russian investments in US securities as of August have fallen to just $14 billion. Back in 2011, Russia was one of the largest holders of US debt with a $180 billion investment.

The reason is not only about politics and US sanctions against Russia, a broker at Otkritie bank Timur Nigmatullin told RIA Novosti. The US Federal Reserve is hiking interest rates, which makes American bonds cheaper, he said. "Russia has almost dropped out of the list of holders of US government debt, being the 54th largest holder."

Arrow Up

North and South Korea agree to reconnect rail and road links - US triggered by too much peace

Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in
Monday talks between North and South Korea ended with new historic agreements toward ending nearly 70 years of war. This includes pledges to reconnect roads between the two nations, and rail lines.

65 years of armistice has meant a demilitarized zone separating the nations, and heavy military presences on either side. As diplomatic progress continues, the re-connection of transportation underscores how quickly ties could be normalized.

This is good news for everybody, except apparently the Trump Administration, which is expressing "concern" about the rate of progress being made in Korean diplomacy, interfering with US plans to keep sanctions against North Korea tightly in place.

South Korea's President Moon has been increasingly open in his disagreement with the US on the matter, saying North Korea deserves some rewards for its progress made toward denuclearization.

Comment: The agreement signed between Kim and Trump specified the order in which events are to take place. The U.S. is already pretending this agreement doesn't exist. Peace treaty first, denuclearization after that. Luckily Moon and Kim are proceeding apace, despite American belligerence.


Yoda

Putin: After a nuclear holocaust, we'll go to heaven as martyrs; those who nuked us will go to hell

Tsar-bomba
© Mikhail Voskresensky/SputnikA mock-up of the “Tsar-bomba” (RDS-220) a 100-megaton yield thermonuclear device tested by Soviet Union in 1961, the most powerful ever created
If any nation decides to attack Russia with nuclear weapons, it may end life on Earth; but unlike the aggressors, the Russians are sure to go to heaven, President Vladimir Putin has said.

"Any aggressor should know that retribution will be inevitable and he will be destroyed. And since we will be the victims of his aggression, we will be going to heaven as martyrs. They will simply drop dead, won't even have time to repent," Putin said during a session of the Valdai Club in Sochi.

He added that Russia's nuclear forces are not tailored for a pre-emptive strike, and exist as a second-strike capability meant to deter an attack by a foreign nation.

Megaphone

Putin: ISIS took several US & European citizens hostage in US-controlled part of Syria

isis
© Reuters
The 700 hostages captured in Syria by Islamic State terrorists include US and European citizens and are being killed off 10 people a day, Russia'a Vladimir Putin said, criticizing American forces for "catastrophic" failure.

Islamic State terrorists "have delivered ultimatums and made certain demands, threatening ... to shoot ten people every day," the Russian leader said, adding that the hostage-takers already started carrying out their threats and executed ten hostages two days ago.

"This is just horrible, it is a catastrophe," Putin said, adding that the US forces that claim to control the area around the east bank of the Euphrates River, relying on the Kurdish armed forces on the ground, stay conspicuously silent on this crisis.

"Some US and European citizens are among the hostages," the president warned, adding that "everyone is silent ... as if nothing has happened."

"They [the US] have clearly fallen short of their target," Putin said, adding that Washington and its allies apparently failed to combat terrorists in the part of Syria they occupy. Islamic State terrorists continue to expand their presence in the area, he said.

Yoda

Lavrov: Russia will be ready for large-scale provocations by the West

Lavrov
© Sputnik / Aleksej Filipov
Western provocation, the prospect of WWIII, and China's closer stance with Russia are just some of the topics that Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has spoken about with RT France.

"We will be ready for larger-scale provocations too. But our answer is very simple - if they talk to us through the media, we will respond through the media too, but specifically and in a correct manner," Lavrov said, answering questions from RT France, Paris Match and Le Figaro.

Going further, he said a third world war is an unimaginable scenario, noting that "everybody would be sane enough not to let it happen." However, an aggravating factor is the absence of any dialogue between the Russian military and NATO.

Snakes in Suits

From Hillary to Elizabeth, Democratic distractions hurting the party in midterms

warren and hillary
With three weeks to go in what should be a strong midterm election for them, here's what the Democrats don't need:

Hillary Clinton justifying her husband's sexual affair with a White House intern because she was over 21. Elizabeth Warren doing a DNA test that shows she has a minuscule fraction of Native American ancestry and getting denounced by the Cherokee Nation. Heidi Heitkamp having to apologize for putting out a letter naming sexual assault victims without their permission.

These are, to put it mildly, all self-inflicted wounds.

Eye 2

Psychopath Netanyahu vows "large-scale military activity" against Gaza following alleged attacks by Hamas

Gaza Strip
© Reuters / Finbarr O'ReillyAn Israeli soldier next to mobile artillery unit near the Gaza Strip
Israel's Prime Minister has explicitly warned Hamas that the IDF is edging closer to yet another full-blown military operation against the Gaza strip to put an end to cross-border violence.

Tel Aviv's patience appears to be running extremely thin from the seven months of violence along the Israeli-Gaza border. The Jewish nation is also uncompromising in its commitment to prevent Palestinian boats sailing up to the maritime boundary between Israel and the coastal enclave and promised to act unless Hamas stops launching rockets and incendiary balloons that threaten Israeli civilians.

"Israel views, with great severity, the attacks on it along the fence, on the Gaza perimeter, on Beersheba, everywhere," Netanyahu said Wednesday after the IDF struck Hamas targets in retaliation to rocket fire which damaged a house in the Southern Israeli city of Beersheba. "I said at the beginning of this week's cabinet meeting that if these attacks do not stop, we will stop them. I want to tell you today [that] Israel will act with great force."

Comment: Israel is likely keen to move things along since the international outcry and backlash, brought about by Israeli crimes against Palestinians, is building:



TV

Israel's ambassador to France slammed for trying to censor news story about Gazan children crippled by Israeli snipers

Aliza bin Noun
Aliza bin Noun
Israeli Ambassador to France Aliza bin Noun is under fire for attempts to censor a news report on the situation in the Gaza Strip. The report aired on France 2, despite her demands that it never be aired.

The report, titled "Gaza's disabled teens," was an investigative story on Palestinian teens who had been crippled by Israeli sniper fire into the Gaza Strip. This included a number of teens who lost legs, and their difficulty in getting by on a single leg in the strip.

Bin Noun argued that the report on Israeli snipers shooting and crippling teenage civilians "vilifies Israel" and subsequently posed a threat to the French Jewish community. French newspaper Le Monde noted that no one at the Israeli Embassy had even seen the report before protesting that it would be aired, and that bin Noun complained Israel wasn't allowed to respond even though the Israeli military spokesman was interviewed in the report.

Comment: Israel's nefarious influence on governments all over the world has been widely documented:



Bad Guys

Operation Choke Point: Obama's secret war on political enemies finally unmasked

Barak obama paranoid
James Madison once wrote that "the rights of persons, and the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection of which government was instituted." While in recent years our political leaders have not always lived up to Madison's vision of government, rarely have they engaged in such blatant disregard for our constitutional rights as they did during Operation Choke Point - a secret program launched under the Obama administration to punish political adversaries.

Operation Choke Point was a plot by President Obama's Department of Justice, the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and other government agencies to cut off banking and financial services for small businesses and industries that they deemed to be political enemies or otherwise undesirable.

Some of these businesses included gun stores, ammunition shops, fireworks stores, small dollar lenders, and home-based charities.

Bad Guys

Dehumanising! Twitter & Atlantic Council release millions of Tweets from 'Russian trolls'

Twitter Russia flag
© Dado Ruvic / Reuters
Ahead of midterm elections, Twitter has reminded Americans that democracy is still under threat by releasing millions of tweets by pesky Russians (and Iranians) from the past decade. How do they know? Well, that's the question.

Twitter says the database released on Wednesday contains an archive of tweets and media "we believe resulted from potentially state-backed information operations." Translation: dastardly Russian (and some Iranian!) trolls looking to corrupt the sanctity of American elections.

Some ten million posts - dating back to 2009 - come from 3,841 accounts Twitter thinks are highly likely connected to the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA), and from 770 supposedly "backed by" Iran. Most of the content dealt with American politics, weighing in on both sides of the widening left-right divide in the US. Posts about Black Lives Matter activism: Russian bots. Gun rights? Russian bots. NFL players kneeling for the national anthem? Yep, Russian bots.