This weekend's alleged chemical-weapon attack on civilians in Syria has all the hallmarks of a false-flag propaganda stunt. Only people who have had their critical senses numbed by saturated Western media distortion could possibly believe otherwise.

Three hallmarks are: the typically unverified claims and videos showing children being hosed down, which are attributed to the discredited media outlet, the so-called White Helmets. This group is embedded with terrorist organizations like Nusra Front and Jaysh al Islam, among others, but is eulogized in Western media as a respectable source. Anything that the White Helmets claim should be taken with extreme caution, if not contempt.

Secondly, the unverified claims are nevertheless quickly and uncritically broadcast by Western mainstream news media with the pejorative implication of the Syrian "regime" being responsible, as well as allied Russian forces.

As trade tensions threaten to boil over between the two nations, US President Donald Trump insists his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping will scrap barriers to commerce "because it is the right thing to do."

Washington is seeking to cut a deal with the Chinese government to eradicate a trade deficit and allow US products to enter the market in Asia more freely. The US president has also accused China of intellectual property theft, through practices that require US business to transfer technology information to Chinese companies.

When it emerged that the dodgy Trump dossier - supposedly 'proof' that Russia 'meddled' in the 2016 US election - was put together by a 'former' British spy named Christopher Steele, no one thought too much of it because, well, 'the Special Relationship' and all that. But in the course of the 'Russiagate' investigations, it has emerged that Steele's source in turn - described in the British press as a 'Maltese professor with close connections to the Kremlin' - is in fact someone whose actual ties place him close to the British establishment.‌

‌In the meantime, the Skripal spy saga has again led to Russia being portrayed as a 'rogue state', but this attempt to frame Russia for conducting a chemical weapons attack on British soil is backfiring spectacularly on the UK government. Concurrently, media exposure of how a nominally American company - Cambridge Analytica - used Facebook users' data to 'rig' both the Brexit referendum and the US election for Trump has also inadvertently lifted the lid on the British establishment's meddling in both those events and many others around the world.‌

What on Earth is going on here? Why are so many threads in the biggest scandals of the day - all ostensibly leading to the Kremlin in Moscow - in fact all leading back to London, England? With the latest "chemical weapon" attack in East Ghouta happening today, after Russia warned that it was imminent TWO DAYS AGO, what kind of stupid do America and the UK have to be to blame Russia and Syria?

On this week's show, we're going to take a closer look at the small island off northwestern Europe and the big - and often dark - role it has played on the world stage.‌

You can listen and call in live with questions or comments from 4-5:30pm UTC / 12-1:30pm EDT / 6-7:30pm CET this Sunday April 8th.

Running Time: 01:43:23

Download: MP3

Israel has faced mounting questions over its use of live fire after 10 days of protests and clashes along the border fence with Gaza.

On Sunday, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman denied reports about a number of "naive people" having been killed in the Hamas-governed Gaza Strip.

"Everyone's connected to Hamas, everyone gets a salary from Hamas, and all the activists trying to challenge us and breach the border are Hamas military wing activists," Lieberman told Israel's public radio.

Health officials in Gaza earlier said that 30 Palestinians, including a journalist, had been killed during 10 days of protests and clashes with Israeli security forces, AFP reported from Jerusalem.

Afghanistan has been dealing with dire security instability for years, with the situation becoming sharply worse in recent months, as the Taliban has been carrying out offensives on major cities.

Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Sunday that Russia was the only force that could help Afghanistan fight terrorism.

"I understand perfectly well that if you [Russia] build new relations with Pakistan and Afghanistan, you can help us. Not the Britons as we kicked them out of the country several times, not the Americans as they've been killing us for 17 years, but Russia only. We [Afghanistan] are the last barrier from terrorists. We've been fighting continuously for a century and a half," Karzai told the Russian NTV TV channel.

"Moscow has always helped us, even when its forces invaded Afghanistan at the invitation of then-president Babrak Karmal. We surely fought each other at those times, but you [Russia] used to build schools and hospitals in Afghanistan. Americans lie when they say that al-Qaeda emerged as the result of your invasion. They used the war to grow al-Qaeda in Pakistani military camps. They wanted to be the only superpower and they did it. The USSR collapsed and one of the reasons was the Afghan war," Karzai said.

The Syrian government is holding negotiations with Jaysh al-Islam militants on Sunday after the group requested talks, state media reports. The city of Douma is one of the remaining strongholds controlled by the radical group.

Damascus agreed to negotiate with one of the last major militant groups holding out in Douma in a bid to protect civilians and liberate abductees, state news agency SANA reported, citing an official source.

Meanwhile, Sputnik news agency reported that the talks have already yielded results, with the militants agreeing to withdraw from the city in two groups and release the prisoners.

The radical Islamist group, which has been accused of using civilians as human shields, earlier agreed to leave the enclave of Eastern Ghouta near the Syrian capital. Jaysh al-Islam will have to clear barricades and provide maps of minefields that they have laid in the area. The militants were set to begin withdrawing from the city of Douma on Sunday, the head of the Russian Defense Ministry's Syrian Reconciliation Center, Major General Yury Yevtushenko has said.

Granville Post editors note: We have been running materials from our colleague F.W. ENGDAHL's book Manifest Destiny-Democracy as Cognitive Dissonance for several weeks. On this occasion, the choice of the material is exercised by Greg Maybury, a fellow contributing editor from Australia, who also publishes the invaluable site poxamerikana.com. We'll let Greg introduce the selection that follows. - PG

THE RAPE OF RUSSIA: The CIA's Yeltsin Coup d'État.

EXTRACT FROM - MANIFEST DESTINY: DEMOCRACY AS COGNITIVE DISSONANCE, by F William Engdahl © F. William Engdahl.

All rights reserved. Republished with permission from the author. [N.B.: All quotations/references/sources are cited in the text].

As noted in earlier postings, William Engdahl has given me the nod to post -at my discretion- excerpts from his new book, Manifest Destiny: Democracy as Cognitive Dissonance. Last week I published an extract from the introduction, wherein Mr Engdahl lays out his stall. His "stall" in this case is the degree to which the Home of the Brave and Land of the Free has interfered in the political and economic affairs of other countries over the decades. I'll be publishing two more extracts in the coming weeks.

This week's extract is from Chapter Three: The Rape of Russia: The CIA's Yeltsin Coup d'État. It provides a taster of the author's own detailed and insightful take on the West's historically unprecedented pillaging, raping, and plundering of the Russian Federation - the sheer scale of which I and others have noted before brought said Federation to the brink of economic collapse and disintegration as a political entity. The brazen degree in which the U.S. not only interfered in - but shaped and manipulated to its own ends -the Russian political landscape through the 90s, is laid bare by Engdahl. It perfectly case-studies the very definition of what we might think of as anarcho-capitalism, albeit a unique version thereof.

Ably 'accompliced' by their hand-picked, vodka-marinated marionette president Boris Yeltsin, his 'Bratva' (mafia) network and assorted Soviet-era (communist) apparatchiks cum Russian (capitalist) oligarchs in the making, it represented nothing less than a concerted, deliberate, and cold blooded attempt by the political and economic forces of the West to firstly bilk 'n bleed Russia, [then] bankrupt it, and finally to 'Balkanise' it.

The western propaganda machine is endlessly impressive. People are so pervasively brainwashed by mass media psyops that they now find it easier to believe that Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin are deliberately killing civilians with poisonous gas for no reason whatsoever than to believe that the same empire which deceived us into Iraq is deceiving us into Iraq's next-door neighbor Syria.

There are early reports of another mass casualty chemical weapons attack in Syria, as usual in a region crawling with known terrorist forces, and as usual just as those terrorists are suffering critical defeats. As usual, the attack is placed in a location replete with children and cameras. As usual, all the expected high-profile pro-regime change propagandists are all over it, from the White Helmets to Charles Lister to Eliot Higgins to Julian Röpcke.

Details are sketchy and unconfirmed, but the early narrative being promulgated is clear.

"If 30+ died in the CW attack in Douma, then it would be the most fatalities in a chemical attack in Syria since Khan Sheikhoun just over a year ago," said the Atlantic Council's Eliot Higgins of the attack. "This could be another major moment in the conflict, something depressingly dependent on whether or not Fox and Friends covers it."

The service is conducted by Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Kirill
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev with his wife Svetlana Medvedev have arrived to the Easter Service in Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral.

The service, conducted by Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, is also attended by Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin and other prominent political and public figures.

The Russian Embassy in London has requested a meeting with UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, saying that discussing the Skripal case and other issues regarding Russia-UK relations is long overdue.

With the saga of the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter unfolding and London not backing down on claims of Moscow's guilt, the embassy bemoaned the level of communication with the UK Foreign Office. Calling it "utterly unsatisfactory," the diplomatic mission called for the situation to be reversed.