A months-long investigation which tracked and exposed a massive covert weapons shipment network to terror groups in Syria via diplomatic flights originating in the Caucuses and Eastern Europe under the watch of the CIA and other intelligence agencies has resulted in the interrogation and firing of the Bulgarian journalist who first broke the story. This comes as the original report is finally breaking into mainstream international coverage.

Investigative reporter Dilyana Gaytandzhieva authored a bombshell report for Trud Newspaper, based in Sofia, Bulgaria, which found that an Azerbaijan state airline company was regularly transporting tons of weaponry to Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Turkey under diplomatic cover as part of the CIA covert program to supply anti-Assad fighters in Syria. Those weapons, Gaytandzhieva found, ended up in the hands of ISIS and al-Qaeda terrorists in Iraq and Syria.

While it's long been understood that the US-Gulf-NATO coalition arming rebels inside Syria facilitated the rapid rise of the Islamic State as the group had steady access to a "jihadi Wal-Mart" of weapons (in the words of one former spy and British diplomat), the Trud Newspaper report is the first to provide exhaustive documentation detailing the precise logistical chain of the weapons as they flowed from their country of origin to the battlefield in Syria and Iraq. Gaytandzhieva even traveled to Aleppo where she filmed and examined labeled weapons shipping containers held in underground jihadist storehouses.

The left-wing Guardian newspaper has registered as a tax-exempt charity in the United States following years of financial turmoil, despite consistently campaigning against offshore tax avoidance by other companies.

"Set up by the Scott Trust, TheGuardian.org will raise funds from individuals and foundations and direct them towards projects that advance public discourse and citizen participation around issues such as climate change, human rights, global development and inequality," the publication announced on Monday.

"The creation of TheGuardian.org, which has tax-exempt status and is overseen by an independent board, builds on the Guardian's long-standing tradition of partnering with like-minded philanthropic organizations in order to produce impactful, editorially-independent journalism."

In the first months of operation, the project has secured more than US$1 million in grants.

Guardian Media Group (GMG) has been plagued by large financial losses in recent years. In 2016, the company announced losses of £68.7 million (US$88.9m). In 2017 it cut that figure to £44.7 million.

Since last year, the newspaper has been asking readers to help ease its financial problems by donating.

In the United States, facts, an important element of truth, are not important. They are not important in the media, politics, universities, historical explanations, or the courtroom. Non-factual explanations of the collapse of three World Trade Center buildings are served up as the official explanation. Facts have been politicized, emotionalized, weaponized and simply ignored. As David Irving has shown, Anglo-American histories of World War 2 are, for the most part, feel-good histories, as are "civil war" histories as Thomas DiLorenzo and others have demonstrated. Of course, they are feel good only for the victors. Their emotional purpose means that inconvenient facts are unpalatable and ignored.

Writing the truth is no way to succeed as an author. Only a small percentage of readers are interested in the truth. Most want their biases or brainwashing vindicated. They want to read what they already believe. It is comforting, reassuring. When their ignorance is confronted, they become angry. The way to be successful as a writer is to pick a group and give them what they want. There is always a market for romance novels and for histories that uphold a country's myths. On the Internet successful sites are those that play to one ideology or another, to one emotion or the other, or to one interest group or another. The single rule for success is to confine truth to what the readership group you serve believes.

Keep this in mind when you receive shortly my September quarterly request for your support of this website. There are not many like it. This site does not represent an interest group, an ideology, a hate group, an ethnic group or any cause other than truth. This is not to say that this site is proof against error. It is only to say that truth is its purpose.

It has been nearly three weeks since The Nation pushed an explosive memo from the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity into mainstream consciousness with an article detailing the evidence that the DNC leaks last year could not have been the result of a Russian hack. By continuing to ignore it, the US intelligence community and all the pundits and politicians who have advanced the Russian hacking narrative are tacitly admitting that they lied.

The report is unequivocal. Not only could Russian hackers not have obtained the DNC emails in the way they are alleged to have obtained them, but metadata was in fact manipulated to implicate Russia in the leak. Since publication of the viral Nation article, even more evidence has come to light showing that a hack is far more improbable even than originally suspected. This means that there is currently more publicly-available evidence indicating that Russia did not hack the DNC than there is that it did.

Washington will violate its commitment to the Non-Proliferation Treaty if it deploys the new B61-12 nuclear bombs to NATO allies in Europe, the Russian Foreign Ministry has warned. The statement comes after the recent second test of the weapon.


"The most recent variations of the B61-12 bombs are also designed for deployment to the territory of a number of NATO countries in Europe for use as part of the so-called nuclear missions involving pilots from the alliance's non-nuclear member-states," the director of the Russian Foreign Ministry's Department for Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Department, Mikhail Ulyanov, told TASS news agency.

"According to our assessment, this runs counter to the NPT [the Non-Proliferation Treaty] commitments," the Russian diplomat said on Tuesday after the US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced it had conducted the second successful flight test of B61-12 gravity nuclear bombs in Nevada.

The Maduro regime denies its once oil-rich country is in crisis. But on the streets the desperation cannot be hidden

Hunger is gnawing at Venezuela, where a government that claims to rule for the poorest has left most of its 31 million people short of food, many desperately so. As night falls over Caracas, and most of the city's residents lock their doors against its ever more violent streets, Adriana Velásquez gets ready for work, heading out into an uncertain darkness as she has done since hunger forced her into the only job she could find at 14.

She was introduced to her brothel madam by a friend more than two years ago after her mother, a single parent, was fired and the two ran out of food. "It was really hard, but we were going to bed without eating," said the teenager, whose name has been changed to protect her.

Since then Venezuela's crisis has deepened, the number of women working at the brothel has doubled, and their ages have dropped. "I was the youngest when I started. Now there are girls who are 12 or 13. Almost all of us are there because of the crisis, because of hunger."

She earns 400,000 bolivares a month, around four times the minimum wage, but at a time of hyperinflation that is now worth about $30, barely enough to feed herself, her mother and a new baby brother. She has signed up to evening classes that run before her nightly shift, and hopes to one day escape from a job where "everything is ugly".

Velásquez grew up in one of Caracas's poorest and most violent districts, but Venezuela's food crisis respects neither class nor geography. The pangs of hunger are felt through the corridors of its major businesses, behind the microphone on radio shows, in hospitals where malnutrition is climbing sharply and already claiming lives, and at schools where children faint and teachers skip classes to queue for food.

It was recently announced that The Young Turks Network, led by Cenk Uygur, had secured $20 million dollars in funding to bolster their business/media presence. But while Cenk Uygur attempts to sell his brand to the public as a progressive alternative media outlet, facts reveal that this is nothing more than a façade meant to lure young liberal pragmatists into buying into a hidden corporatist agenda.

The $20 million in funding is slated to be used to increase the size of the TYT newsroom and for business operations - but where did the money actually come from?

It is important to note that TYT has reported on some hard-hitting stories and exposed serious problems within the state, and Uygur was unafraid of calling out corruption-so much so that he quit his job at MSNBC to work on the media project. However, once we start following the recent money, we can see a telling revelation begin to unfold.

The funding comes from a number of sources, so let's take a look at these entities and the people behind them to better understand the agenda at play.

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is trimming State Department staff, with an eye on positions added under former President Barack Obama.

Of the 38 positions created under the former administration, 23 will be either removed or reassigned, a senior Trump administration official told Fox News on Tuesday. The staffers whose positions will be eliminated are those who worked on projects such as closing Guantanamo Bay, implementing the Iran Deal and the transparency coordinator position created in response to Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server.

The reorganization is broader than just those 38 staffers. A senior State Department official said Tillerson informed Congress on Monday of his plans to eliminate and reorganize his staff of special envoys and special representatives. Of the 66 titles discussed with lawmakers, only 30 envoys and representatives with title will remain on board. Twenty-one other staffers will be integrated into other bureaus, while nine will be eliminated entirely. The remaining spots will be "folded into existing positions" or transferred to USAID.

YouTube stands accused of censorship, following the company's decision to bar former Congressman Ron Paul and his online news program from receiving advertising revenue for a number of videos which Paul recently posted.

Upon "manual review," the website has found a series of videos posted by the Ron Paul Liberty Report "unsuitable for all advertisers," effectively denying Paul and his online news program potential revenue from views.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange called it "economic censorship,"noting that the 'unsuitable' videos featured the former congressman's criticism of president Donald Trump's decision to send more American troops to Afghanistan, as well as criticizing the US Senate Intelligence Committee for terming Wikileaks a hostile foreign intelligence service last week.

The U.S., long known for its meddling in the affairs of other nations, also has a long and sordid history of supporting military juntas abroad, many of which it forced into power through bloody coups or behind-the-scenes power grabs. From Greece in the 1960s to Argentina in the 1980s to the current al-Sisi-led junta in Egypt, Washington has actively and repeatedly supported such undemocratic regimes despite casting itself as the world's greatest promoter of "democracy."

Finally in 2017, karma appears to have come back to roost, as the current presidential administration has now effectively morphed into what is, by definition, a military junta. Though the military-industrial complex has long directed U.S. foreign policy, in the administration of President Donald Trump a group of military officers has gathered unprecedented power and, for all intents and purposes, rules the country.