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Jet5

Syrian military: Israeli warplanes increase flights over Syrian-Lebanese border amid fears of another big strike

Israeli F-16 fighter jet
Israeli F-16 fighter jet
Israeli warplanes were once again seen stalking the Syrian-Lebanese border just two weeks after launching their largest assault on Damascus since the 1973 October War (var. Yom Kippur War, Ramadan War).

According to a Syrian military report, the Israeli warplanes began their flights in southern Lebanon near the town of Marjeyoun before they made their way towards the Syrian border.

In addition to their flights over these areas, an Israeli warplane was seen above the Lebanese capital of Beirut.

Bad Guys

Washington: Can't beat Assad, so let's punish his people

Syria
© Sana Sana / Reuters
The bombs continue to fall over Syria to the consternation of all concerned. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad warns of a conflict on Syrian soil that will embroil Israel, Iran, and Russia. "Things," he says, "could spin out of control."

The escalating violence between Iran and Israel in recent days is clear evidence of a new post-"Assad must go" phase in Syria's ongoing misery.

One might have thought that after losing the war for regime change in Syria, Washington would undertake a soul-searching review of the spurious assumptions and myriad other problems that produced the ongoing debacle. One might have thought they would at least try to work out a post-war policy for Syria that puts right the incredible damage done to that country and its long-suffering citizens.

Instead, the U.S. is doubling down on its failed campaign against Assad, mobilizing an international coalition to deny him and, more importantly, the Syrian people the tools to rebuild. The weapons in this battle are not F-15s or mortars but aid for reconstruction, international finance for the rehabilitation of Syria's public and private infrastructure, and a crushing sanctions regime meant to sabotage the ability of Assad's Syria and its decimated private sector to emerge from the ashes. To top it off, there's been a feeble if expensive effort to create, with the support of Washington's "friends of Syria," something different in the eastern parts of the country currently outside the regime's control.

Comment: How dare Syrians overwhelmingly support and illegitimately vote for Assad to be their leader. It is unacceptable. Therefore, it makes sense that they should be punished. They made the wrong choice.


Bad Guys

US attempts to smear Venezuela's Maduro ahead of 'fake' elections by accusing him of drug profiteering

Nicolas Maduro sitting together with Diosdado Cabello
© ReutersNicolas Maduro sitting together with Diosdado Cabello
The US has criticized the upcoming Venezuelan elections as 'fake,' and rushed to support 'democracy' by slapping a top ruling-party member with new sanctions and accusing President Nicolas Maduro of drug-trade profiteering.

The "second most powerful man in Venezuela," Diosdado Cabello, immediately brushed aside the accusations and new US sanctions introduced against him for allegedly heading a drug ring. He said such slander would only strengthen the ruling party's candidate, Maduro, to win Sunday's elections.

"In truth I feel liberated, that imperialism is busy persecuting this humble soldier and his family, strengthens me, forces me every day to continue fighting for the causes that I believe and to be faithful and loyal to our beloved people," Cabello, who is vice president of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), said in a tweet after the US Treasury slapped him - as well as two members of his family, and his "front man" - with sanctions ahead of the election.

Comment: And yet the US accuses Russia of election 'interference':


Gear

Enough is enough: German AfD party sues Merkel amid open-door policy toward migrants

German Chancellor Angela Merkel
© AP Photo / Michael KappelerGerman Chancellor Angela Merkel attends a plenary session of German parliament Bundestag in Berlin, Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2017
The party claims that the federal government had excluded the Bundestag from the decision-making process, which could be considered a violation of the country's constitution.

The German right-wing party "Alternative for Germany" (AfD) has filed a complaint against German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the German Die Zeit newspaper reported, referring to AfD's lawyer Stefan Brandner.

The complaint was submitted to the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe in connection with the government's migration policy, which AfD has repeatedly criticized.

Comment: See also:


Bulb

Trump's great plan for Iran: Put terrorists in charge

Giuliani
© Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post via Getty ImagesIn mid April 2018, Giuliani joined President Trump's legal team
Back in the 2008 presidential race, I explained to then-candidate Rudy Giuliani the concept of "blowback." Years of US meddling and military occupation of parts of the Middle East motivated a group of terrorists to carry out attacks against the United States on 9/11. They didn't do it because we are so rich and so free, as the neocons would have us believe. They came over here because we had been killing Muslims "over there" for decades.

How do we know this? Well, they told us. Osama bin Laden made it clear why al-Qaeda sought to attack the US. They didn't like the US taking sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict and they didn't like US troops on their holy land.

Why believe a terrorist, some responded. As I explained to Giuliani ten years ago, the concept of "blowback" is well-known in the US intelligence community and particularly by the CIA.

Unfortunately, it is clear that Giuliani never really understood what I was trying to tell him. Like the rest of the neocons, he either doesn't get it or doesn't want to get it. In a recent speech to the MeK - a violent Islamist-Marxist cult that spent two decades on the US terror watch list - Giuliani promised that the Trump Administration had made "regime change" a priority for Iran. He even told the members of that organization - an organization that has killed dozens of Americans - that Trump would put them in charge of Iran!

Comment: The problem with "interventionistas", as Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls them, is that they have no skin in the game. They don't have to pay any consequences if they're wrong. So when they are inevitably wrong, and their simplistic delusions fail, they are free to try them again, and again, and again.

More on MEK:


Question

Trying to make sense of Russian political ambiguities

Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin
Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin
Introduction: the world is not Hollywood

The past couple of weeks saw a number of truly tectonic events taking place simultaneously in the US, in Russia, in Israel, in Syria, in Iran and in the EU. I think that it would also be reasonable to say that most of those who opposed the AngloZionist Empire have felt feelings ranging from mild disappointment to total dismay. I sure did not hear many people rejoicing, but if somebody was, they were in the minority (uncharacteristically, Mikhail Khazin, for example). These reactions are normal, we all form expectations which can be, and often are, disappointed. Still, even when the news is clearly bad it is helpful to keep a number of things in mind.

First, people, countries and events are not frozen in time. They are processes. Processes, by definition, are subject to change, evolution and (even radical) changes in direction.

Second, each process carries within itself the seeds of its own contradiction. This is what makes processes dynamic.

Stop

No democracy for you: Canada bans Venezuelan expats from voting in election

venezuela flag
© Reuters
"Who is preventing here the right to suffrage and to vote?" said Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza.

Canada is prohibiting its Venezuelan immigrants from voting in the coming May 20 presidential elections, Bolivarian Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza said during a press conference Wednesday.

Canadian authorities said they will not allow Venezuelan embassies or consulates in the cities of Toronto, Ottawa or Vancouver to install polling stations.

"They denounce that there is a dictatorship in Venezuela, but who is denying the right to vote? Only dictatorship countries do not allow citizens to exercise their right to vote, so I ask if Venezuela - according to some world nations - is a dictatorship, how is it that today Canada intends to curtail the right to vote of Venezuelans?

"Who is preventing here the right to suffrage and to vote, the government of Venezuela or the government of Canada?" Arreaza said.

MIB

FBI spy-op exposed: Trump campaign infiltrated by longtime CIA and MI6 asset

Stefan Halper
Following two weeks of mounting speculation over the FBI's so-called "mole" inside the Trump campaign, the New York Times and Washington Post published separate accounts on Friday detailing the infiltration of the Trump campaign - a scheme revealed in a Wednesday report by the New York Times in which "at least one government informant met several times with Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos." The Wednesday report also disclosed the existence of "Operation Crossfire Hurricane" - the FBI's code name for their early Trump-Russia investigation.

Thanks to Friday's carefully crafted deep-state disclosures by WaPo and the Times, along with actual reporting by the Daily Caller's Chuck Ross, we now know it wasn't a mole at all - but 73-year-old University of Cambridge professor Stefan Halper, a US citizen, political veteran and longtime US Intelligence asset enlisted by the FBI to befriend and spy on three members of the Trump campaign during the 2016 US election.

Comment: For more on Halper:


Question

Will Russia abandon the OPEC deal?

Oil rig
OPEC and Russia are meeting in a little more than a month to discuss the progress of their oil production deal and what's next. On the face of things, there will be no surprises: every country taking part in the deal is still committed to the cuts until the end of the year.

But Russia pumped more than its quota in both March and April. But Energy Minister Alexander Novak hinted that Russia might like to see a gradual easing of the cuts following the June meeting. But Iran sanctions will remove a certain amount of Iranian crude from international markets, making space for more from other producers, and Russia may just surprise its partners in the deal.

Citigroup commodity analysts this week estimated that Russia has 408,000 bpd in idled capacity, which constitutes 4 percent of its total, which stands at 11.3 million bpd. That's a lot less than Saudi Arabia's idle capacity, which stands at 2.12 million bpd, but is apparently still a significant enough portion of the total.

Eye 1

Yesterday's hegemony keeps Washington confused

Donald Trump
At this point, there's hardly any doubt left that Western elites are reluctant to admit that they've faced a major crisis.

Over a short period of time, the people of this world were presented with a number of challenges no one is really willing to face. Those are military clashes, political disputes, along with the drastic aggravation of international relations between key international players. Against this background, Russia's relations with a number of Western states sunk to a new low. Western elites try to argue that this situation was triggered by the steps that Moscow took, and above the positions that Russia's President Vladimir Putin occupied on a number of issues. There's no arguing that a strong Russian leader must be really annoying for those politicians in the West that are rapidly losing their authority along with their face. In fact, there's a long list of their own personal failures they are trying to blame on the policies pursued by Russia and its president.

At the same time, there's an ever increasing number of people in the West who are genuinely trying to figure out highly puzzling realities of today's geopolitics for themselves, since the blame game that is being sold to them as a universal explanation of all problems doesn't fulfill their curiosity. Among such people, one can name the political observer of the German newspaper Die Zeit, Jochen Bittner. He has a reputation of an intelligent man that is always trying to establish the cause of any phenomenon, although he can hardly be described as a Russian sympathizer. In his recent article published by The New York Times, he compares the current state of international relations with the so-called Great Game of the nineteenth century, during which great powers would use all sorts of tricks to obtain more influence.