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Xi Jinping reelected Chinese leader in unanimous vote by lawmakers

Xi Jinping and Wang Qishan
© Jason Lee / Reuters
Xi Jinping was reelected as president by China's National People's Congress for a second five-year term on Saturday. It came a week after delegates voted to remove the limit on the number of consecutive presidential terms.

Xi, 64, also serves as chairman of the Central Military Commission and general secretary of the Communist Party of China. His reelection went unopposed, as nobody from the nearly 3,000 Chinese legislature members voted against Xi, who first took the reins in 2013.

In a widely anticipated move, Xi's close ally, Wang Qishan, who led a thorough anti-corruption crackdown, was promoted to vice president. Wang stepped down from his senior position in the Communist Party as head of an anti-corruption watchdog last October after reaching the age of 68, a customary age for high-ranking Chinese officials to go into retirement. The age limit is traditional, but non-binding.

Biohazard

Flashback US and Uzbeks Agree on Chemical Arms Plant Cleanup

Uzbekistan's regional divisions map
The United States and Uzbekistan have quietly negotiated and are expected to sign a bilateral agreement today to provide American aid in dismantling and decontaminating one of the former Soviet Union's largest chemical weapons testing facilities, according to Defense Department and Uzbek officials.

Earlier this year, the Pentagon informed Congress that it intends to spend up to $6 million under its Cooperative Threat Reduction program to demilitarize the so-called Chemical Research Institute, in Nukus, Uzbekistan. Soviet defectors and American officials say the Nukus plant was the major research and testing site for a new class of secret, highly lethal chemical weapons called ''Novichok,'' which in Russian means ''new guy.''

The agreement to help Uzbekistan clean up the plant is part of wide-ranging cooperation between Tashkent and Washington since the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan became independent in 1991. Yesterday, American and Uzbek officials opened a series of meetings in Tashkent, the Uzbek capital.

Uzbek officials said in interviews earlier this year that, only after their country became independent, did they come to understand the legacy of pollution that had resulted from their designated role as the Soviet Union's major testing ground for chemical and biological weapons. ''We were shocked when we first learned the real picture,'' said Isan M. Mustafoev, the Deputy Foreign Minister, in an interview in Tashkent last March.

Alarmed by the health and environmental impact of the Soviets' use of Uzbekistan for the production and large-scale testing of illegal chemical and germ weapons, President Islam A. Karimov renounced weapons of mass destruction. Since then, his Government has worked closely with American defense officials, granting them access to sites whose counterparts in Russia are still off limits.

Comment: See also:


Heart - Black

Mueller witness in Russiagate probe has a history of pedophilia - but no connection to Russia

George Nader
© C-SPAN via APThis 1998 frame from video provided by C-SPAN shows president and editor of Middle East Insight George Nader.
How did George Nader - Lebanese-American businessman, globe-trotting "fixer," convicted child molester - get caught up in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation?

The answer, it seems, can be found in the shadows, where Nader has long operated.

His long history included intrepid back-channel mediation between Israel and Arab countries - and a 15-year-old pedophilia conviction in Europe that has not been previously reported. But Mueller, in his investigation of President Donald Trump, his campaign and possible wrongdoing connected to Russia, is focused on Nader's role in two high-level get-togethers after the presidential election, according to three people familiar with the case.

Nader was caught in Mueller's web a few days before the anniversary of Trump's inauguration. He was transiting through Dulles International Airport outside Washington, on his way to Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort, when his plans changed - abruptly and involuntarily.

Mueller's investigators stopped him, people familiar with the case said. His electronics were seized and he was then allowed to go see his lawyer. Nader later agreed to cooperate with Mueller's investigation, said the people with knowledge of the case as it pertains to Nader. They weren't authorized to speak publicly on the case and demanded anonymity.

Nader is little known to the public, a man who has led a shadowy existence as a go-between across numerous Middle East capitals and who gave testimony to Mueller's Washington grand jury earlier this month.

Stop

Moscow shuts British Council and expels 23 diplomats in response to British hysteria

russian consulate uk
The Russian Foreign Ministry said 23 UK diplomats must leave Russia in response to Britain's "provocative actions and groundless accusations" over ex-double agent Sergei Skripal's poisoning. The British Council will also be shut.

Britain's ambassador to Russia, Laurie Bristow, was summoned to the Foreign Ministry on Saturday morning, where he was informed of Moscow's response to London's claims that Russia is behind the alleged poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a former double agent, and his daughter, Yulia, on March 4 in Salisbury, UK.

The ministry issued a statement saying 23 employees of the British embassy in Moscow have been declared personae non gratae. The diplomats must leave within a week. It also announced the operation of the British Council in Russia will be ceased given its "unregulated status."

In addition, Russia is revoking its agreement on the opening and operation of the UK Consulate General in St. Petersburg due to "disparity in the number of consulate facilities of the two countries."

"The British side has been warned that in case further moves of an unfriendly nature towards Russia are implemented, the Russian side reserves the right to take other response measures," the statement added.

Comment: Prior to this announcement, Russian FM spokeswoman Maria Zakharova released the following statement:
"I would like to inform you that the Russian embassy in London has dispatched several diplomatic notes to the Foreign Office with the goal of starting an active dialogue with officials in London over the state of affairs that ensued as a result of the use of poisonous chemicals on British soil," she said. "Four notes were dispatched in all. In reply we got non-committal messages meaning nothing."

"Russia has officially expressed readiness to work, using all the mechanisms and tools of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), but London has been unwilling to cooperate with us within the legal framework, and the trend is only growing," she said.

"We are again officially calling on Great Britain to provide all the materials on the incident, as they call it, with the spread of chemical weapons on UK territory," the diplomat said.

"They invented a story that Moscow had allegedly used a chemical substance in the UK. Why did we need to do that in the spring of 2018? Have reasonable people asked themselves such a question? What could be the reason to do that, who is the beneficiary?" she said. "Beneficiaries are those who have been inventing stories of Russian aggression for the past several years," Zakharova added.

"It requires a large-scale campaign to stimulate internal processes," Zakharova said. "I have no doubts that as far as Prime Minister Theresa May is concerned, the whole affair has internal underlying factors, too."

"The leader of a nuclear country appears in parliament to groundlessly accuse another country of aggression against Britain, set 24-hour deadlines and declare ultimatums. Generally speaking, a national leader acts regardless of any realities, and this is most dangerous and risky," Zakharova said. "There is no link with the real state of affairs at all."
...
"We have been given no data. Why aren't all the international mechanisms involved? Why does not this happen? It is obvious that there is the desire to bring this anti-Russian campaign to a new level," she stressed.

The UK has actually been squeezing Russian diplomats out of the country over the past few years refusing to extend their visas, she said. "Russian diplomats have literally been squeezed out for several years, with all sorts of obstacles created by UK officials, in particular, through visa mechanisms," she said.

"Visas have not actually been extended to many staff members of our embassy and diplomats," Zakharova stressed. She described that as "visa war." "Everything was done to make the work of the Russian Embassy's staff members in Britain as difficult as possible," Zakharova said.

"During high-level meetings, at the foreign ministers' level, Russia has repeatedly proposed to remedy the situation, because at some point we realized that all this is done deliberately and is no coincidence," the diplomat stressed.

"The recent developments are just the most impossible nonsense, logic does not help," she said. "The scale and scope of the use of media and public diplomacy, including addresses to the Security Council and parliament - all this makes the picture complete," Zakharova noted. In response to a question by foreign reporters as to what consequences the Skripal situation could have, the Russian Foreign Ministry's spokeswoman said that "all this is actually very dangerous for global peace and stability."



Briefcase

OPCW claims several countries including US possess smuggled 'Novichok' nerve agent

skripal london londres
© REUTERS/ Henry Nicholls
The 'Novichok' nerve agent allegedly used in the Sergei Skripal attack likely came from a country were Russian chemists were taken after the Soviet Union collapsed to continue their research, Russia's OPCW envoy told RT.

"As for 'Novichok,' there was never a scientific program under such a codename in the Russian Federation," Alexander Shulgin, Russia's permanent representative at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said. "However, in Soviet times, research began to produce a new generation of poisonous substances. Such research was carried out not only in the USSR, but also in the US."

As the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, foreign "special services took a group of scientists... with the research that existed since the Soviet times" out of the country so that they could go on with their studies of poisonous substances, he said.

"We know the exact countries where such work continued, achieving certain success," Shulgin said, without naming any. "The positive results of those studies can now be found in open sources."

"Therefore, we can assume that the source of the substance used [against Skripal] in Salisbury is concealed in one of the countries where this research continued and achieved certain success," the Russian envoy said.

Comment: The UK's patently ridiculous narrative is already falling apart faster than a neocon can hysterically scream "chemical weapons!" See also: MPs retweet claim that Porton Down scientists can't identify nerve agent as evidence of being Russian

Lavrov's assessment of the UK media is on point:
The foreign minister criticized coverage of the incident on Friday, saying Western media were failing to honestly report on the complexity of the situation. "I watched CNN and the BBC today. Their coverage of the story is very simplistic. They said Britain won support and solidarity from France, Germany and the United States, they all demanded an explanation about why Russia poisoned that colonel. And Russia denies poisoning him. That's all," he said.

However, the nuances of the story have been omitted, Lavrov added. Those include the fact that investigation of the incident is still underway, and that Britain has failed to adhere to the rules of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) on how such cases should be handled. The fact that Russia was stonewalled by London when it requested evidence to support the accusations has also been ignored.

"The media professionals from the BBC and other outlets do not tell all those things to their Western audiences. They oversimplify things and make suggestive faces," the Russian minister said. "They put things into the people's heads. I guess those are the methods favored by Western propaganda. I hope we will never sink to such methods."



Bizarro Earth

How the Iraq War destabilized the Middle East through 'freedom and democracy'

US armyh
© The U.S. Army | CC BY 2.0
As we approach the fifteenth anniversary of the unwarranted invasion of Iraq, which we are still paying for in so many ways, it is important to remember the misuse of intelligence that provided a false justification for war. It is particularly important to do so at this time because President Donald Trump has talked about a military option against North Korea or Iran (or Venezuela for that matter). Since there is no cause to justify such wars, it is quite likely that politicized intelligence would once again be used to provide a justification for audiences at home and abroad.

In 2002 and 2003, the White House, the Department of Defense, and the Central Intelligence Agency collaborated in an effort to describe the false likelihood of a nuclear weapons program that had to be stopped. In the words of Bush administration officials, the United States was not going to allow the "smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." On September 8, 2002, Vice President Cheney and national security adviser Condi Rice used that phrase on CNN and NBC's "Meet the Press," respectively, to argue that Saddam Hussein was "using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon."

In October 2002, the CIA orchestrated a national intelligence estimate to argue falsely that Iraq was acquiring uranium from Niger for use in a nuclear weapon. Senior officials throughout the intelligence community knew that the so-called Niger report was a fabrication produced by members of the Italian military intelligence service, and several intelligence officials informed Congressional and White House officials that they doubted the reports of Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger. Nevertheless, the national intelligence estimate spun a fictitious tale of a clear and present danger based on false reports of alleged stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons; nuclear weapons; unmanned aerial vehicles; and ties between Iraq and al Qaeda that were nonexistent.


Comment: Sounds familiar... oh right, Libya, and Syria also needed justification for war, even if it was made up. And let's not forget they still have their eyes set on Iran.


Blackbox

Who poisoned Sergei Skripal? Let's blame Russia!

Novichok Skripal
© Chris J Ratcliffe Getty Images
The latest example of alleged Russian perfidy - the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia - is yet another case of faith-based attribution. In accusing Russia of some heinous crime - in this instance, the murder of a former double agent working for MI6 - one needn't present any real evidence: it's only necessary to point the finger at the Kremlin. And of course we haven't had any real evidence proffered by the British government: Prime Minister Theresa May simply declared that Russia is the culprit and gave a midnight deadline for the Kremlin to explain how "its nerve weapon" - as NBC reported it - was used to attacked Skripal on British soil. She has since announced the expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats.

The absurdity of this was inadvertently underscored by the comments of Vil Mirzayanov, the Russian-born chemist who first revealed the existence of "Novichok," the nerve agent developed by the Russians. Mirzayanov came to the United States in 1995: in 2007, he published a book, State Secrets, which tells his story as a chemist working in Russia's secret chemical weapons facilities. Now 83, he gives the following explanation for the attack on Skripal:
"'Only the Russians' developed this class of nerve agents, said the chemist. 'They kept it and are still keeping it in secrecy.'

"The only other possibility, he said, would be that someone used the formulas in his book to make such a weapon."
Oh, but what kind of a person would do that? Why, that would have to mean that they were trying to frame the Russians by making it look like the work of the FSB, the Russian intelligence agency. And we all know that's just not possible - right?

Comment: So far, there is no evidence that the nerve agent came from a Russian source. See also:


Light Saber

You're fired! Sessions fires McCabe from FBI one day before retirement

mccabe_sessions
After a long day of what seemed like the swamp protecting one of their dirtiest creatures, Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, just over 24 hours before he was set to retire and claim his full pension benefits.

McCabe turns 50 on Sunday - the earliest he would have been eligible for his full retirement benefits.

Sessions noted that both the Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz as well as the FBI's disciplinary office had found "that Mr. McCabe had made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor - including under oath - on multiple occasions."

So, McCabe was involved in leaks and he lied under oath.
Horowitz found that McCabe had authorized two FBI officials to talk to then-Wall Street Journal reporter Devlin Barrett for a story about the case and another investigation into Clinton's family foundation. Barrett now works for The Washington Post. -WaPo
"I have terminated the employment of Andrew McCabe effective immediately," said Sessions, who said he based his decision on the findings.

Comment: McCabe also suggested he was fired as part of an effort to undermine Mueller's Russiagate witch-hunt.




Bad Guys

Trump maneuvers toward war, but "the resistance" refuses to resist

pompeo
Tuesday's post, It's Impossible to Overstate How Terrible Mike Pompeo Is, laid out the view that Trump's firing of Rex Tillerson represents a major shift toward war footing for the Trump administration, with Iran the specific target. This pivot was easily predictable, and I wrote numerous articles doing just that during 2017. Nevertheless, forecasting it and then seeing the disastrous pieces being moved into place are two different things.

Trump's push to install Mike Pompeo as U.S. Secretary of State is a crystal clear indication that he's begun the process of building his war cabinet. The next steps, likely to begin over the course of 2018, is to walk away from the Iran deal. I suspect relentless war propaganda to be unleashed simultaneously as the neocon/neoliberal/mass media war-monger alliance plays its well established role in selling the American public on another pointless and destructive war.

My prior post discussed Pompeo in detail, so I don't want to be repetitive, but to revisit: Pompeo has contempt for the First Amendment, referred to torturers as patriots, wants Edward Snowden executed and is an extreme warhawk when it comes to Iran. In other words, he's your typical neocon lunatic who's just a bit more rough around the edges publicly. He represents the exact opposite sort of foreign policy to what so many Trump voters thought they were getting.

Dollars

American drug cartel: The politicians who took opioid tycoons' blood money

heroin spoon and needle
© Shutterstock/Evdokimov MaximDrug syringe and cooked heroin on spoon.
This is the seventh article in the American Cartel series about the billionaire Sackler family, Purdue Pharma and the opioid epidemic. Read the first, second, third, fourth and fifth, and sixth.
  • OxyContin's manufacturer and its billionaire owners gave millions of dollars to political candidates
  • Purdue and other pharmaceutical companies spread propaganda and lobbied in favor of opioid prescribing
  • When excluding organizations and only looking at candidates, Democrats received nearly $110,000 more than GOP politicians
OxyContin's manufacturer and its billionaire owners gave millions of dollars to political candidates - who often held powerful positions - and organizations, but the opioid profiteers' tentacles of influence reach much farther, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation has found.

The Sackler family and Purdue Pharma, which is widely blamed for playing an essential role in starting the opioid epidemic, have given more than $1.3 million to U.S. candidates and another $1 million to political organizations since OxyContin's creation, according to Center for Responsive Politics data, but that's just the surface of how deep the pharmaceutical titans' influence runs.