Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said that 90 percent of the Japanese population respects the military as he pushes to expand it and change the country's constitution to get rid of its post-WWII pacifist requirements.

"Ninety percent of the population now treats the Self-Defense Force (SDF) with respect," Abe said during a military-themed event on Sunday. "You have gained public trust with your hands."

Speaking in front of about 4,000 servicemen at a military training center in Saitama Prefecture, the prime minister stated it is now up to politicians to create "an environment" for SDF to carry out its duties "with a sense of pride."

SDF functions as Japan's de facto national army. It is considered one of the most advanced and best equipped military structures in the world, and ranks 8th in terms of its budget size.

Militants of illegal armed groups in the south-west of the Syrian province of Idlib comply with the ceasefire regime and partially withdrew heavy weapons from the demilitarized zone on the border with the province of Hama, Nabil, the commander of the Christian militia of Al-Suqaylabiyah city, told Sputnik.

"There is information that armed terrorist groups fulfill the conditions of the agreement. It is also confirmed by some video and photo materials that they publish. According to our sources, there is a partial [weapons] withdrawal. Turkey confirms this through its media. We can say that this is partially true. But the withdrawal is not full, and there is still time for the full implementation of the agreement before October 15," Nabil said.

According to the commander, there have been no violations of the ceasefire regime in the area over the past several days.

On Wednesday, the Turkish Defense Ministry said that all heavy weapons had been withdrawn from the newly-formed demilitarized zone in Idlib.

Rarely is US hypocrisy so cynical and overt as a recent US State Department investigation into ongoing violence in Myanmar, all while the US continues its full spectrum support of Saudi Arabia's genocidal war on Yemen.

In addition to Washington's role in Yemen, the US also occupies Afghanistan and Syria while carrying out drone strikes and covert military interventions in territory stretching from North Africa to Central Asia.

In Myanmar specifically, the US has openly and for decades funded and supported groups and individuals involved directly on both sides of ongoing ethnic violence. Now, it is leveraging that violence to single out obstacles to US influence in Southeast Asia and in Myanmar specifically.

Germany's political landscape is crumbling as Merkel's sister party, the CSU, has only received 35.5% of the votes in Bavaria, an exit poll shows. Meanwhile, the anti-establishment Alternative for Germany (AfD) has entered parliament for the first time.

Voters in Bavaria headed to the polls to decide on the composition of the 180-member parliament on Sunday. The Christian Social Union (CSU) - sister party to Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) - gained 35.5 percent in Germany's largest and second most populous state, according to an exit poll for broadcaster ARD.

It represents the worst election result since 1950, and a loss of its absolute majority for only the second time since 1962. It means the CSU will now have to form a coalition.

Russia has proposed mutual assurances to the United States over non-interference in each other's sovereign affairs, but Washington continues to reject the offer, a senior Russian diplomat told reporters.

Moscow has repeatedly offered such an agreement to the US State Department in recent years, and noted that the scheme worked in 1933 to restore healthy relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, said the head of the Foreign Relations Department the North America, Georgy Borisenko.

In 1933, Soviet Foreign Minister Maksim Litvinov and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt exchanged personal notes with obligations not to interfere in the sovereign affairs of the other nation, Borisenko noted. He said that these mutual guarantees were given at the insistence of the United States because, after the Great Depression, Washington was extremely concerned about the spread of communist ideas.

"Today we are proposing to exchange letters with similar content, for example between the heads of the foreign ministries of Russia and the United States. Unfortunately, Washington is stubbornly avoiding this proposal, they reject it in a simply categorical way," declared the diplomat.

In the Department of Defense authored summary of the National Defense Strategy of the United States for 2018, Secretary James Mattis quite succinctly sets out the challenges and goals of the U.S. military in the immediate future. Importantly, he acknowledges that the U.S. had become far too focused on counter-insurgency over the past two decades, but he seems to miss the causation of this mission in the first place. U.S. foreign policy, and its reliance on military intervention to solve all perceived problems, regime change and imperialist adventurism, resulted in the need to occupy nations, or destroy them. This leads to the growth of insurgencies, and the strengthening of long simmering religious radicalism and anti-western sentiment in the Middle East and Central Asia. The U.S. military willfully threw itself headlong into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The United States engaged in unnecessary wars, and when these wars were easily won on the immediate battlefield, the unplanned for occupations lead to guerilla insurgencies that were not so easy for a conventional military to confront. The U.S. Army was not prepared for guerilla warfare in urban areas, nor for the brutal and immoral tactics that their new enemies were willing to engage in. They obviously had not reflected upon the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, nor the nature of their new enemies. As casualties mounted due to roadside IEDs, snipers, and suicide bombers hidden amongst civilians, the U.S. military and the defense industry were forced to find ways to protect soldiers and make vehicle less vulnerable to these types of attacks. This resulted in vehicles of every description being armored and new IED resistant vehicles being designed and fielded in large numbers. This in turn, equated to a vast amount of time, effort and money. It also focused both the U.S. military services and the defense industry away from fighting conventional wars against peer adversaries.

After a decade of fighting an insurgency in Afghanistan and almost as long in Iraq, the U.S. leadership decided to destroy the sovereign nation of Libya, and foment a war in Syria immediately afterward. There is no doubt with the knowledge of historic events today, that the CIA and State Department facilitated a foreign invasion of Syria of Islamist radicals. They funded and armed these groups, provided clandestine training, and facilitated the logistical movement of fighters and weapons into a sovereign nation to cause its disintegration. In these two examples they decided not to occupy these countries, but to destroy all semblance of ordered society and replace it with brutally violent chaos. The U.S. political and military leadership seems to have learned that their past adventurism resulted in costly occupations, yet instead of refraining from using the military option as a tool to alter geopolitical realities they did not like, they merely opted to abandon the responsibility of occupation and reconstruction all together.

RT America's Rachel Blevins has had her public account axed by Facebook amid the social media giant's recent crackdown on alternative news sources. Blevins says she only posted her journalistic work and is baffled by the move.

Rachel says she had to work hard for four years to amass a following of nearly 70,000 people. She has no clue as to what might have prompted Facebook censors to see red and banish her from the site in the 'inauthentic behavior' crackdown, as she only posted her own work, articles and video reports.

The RT America correspondent said that Facebook listed a plethora of reasons as to why her account got the chop. Rachel says the social media giant said it was a "fake account", was "misleading users" and was "violating Facebook's spam policy".

"I've gotten some comments from people saying maybe its related to RT," the newly minted employee said, who recently started with RT.

During operations to clear terrorist-controlled areas across the country in recent months, Syrian forces discovered countless caches of Western and Israeli-made weapons, munitions and supplies.

Authorities in the town of Yalda, about 10 kilometers south of the Syrian capital, have discovered a large stock of weapons and ammunition carefully hidden inside a plastic water tank at a local farm abandoned by militants, the Syrian Arab News Agency reports.


The discovery included NATO-standard sniper rifles, a LAW portable anti-tank weapon, thermal and night vision equipment, grenades and improvised explosive devices, as well as multiple RPG launchers, Kalashnikovs and Dragunov rifles.

Militants were thought to have hidden the weapons at the farm earlier this year before evacuating from the area to Idlib.

Russian military has delivered about a tonne of food and medicines to Nabia es-Sahr village in Syria's Quneitra province, aid delivery group chief said.

"We have come to [the village] for the first time... We must continue and increase our aid... We are always welcomed with smiles as people are happy that aid has finally arrived," Vladimir Ladeynov told reporters. Russian medical staff have also arrived in the village to provide assistance.

Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin urged the international community to ensure that the process of humanitarian aid provision to Syrian civilians was not affected by politics.

In late August, Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia said that the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees adopted a "passive position" on providing assistance to Syrians due to an internal UN directive, adopted in October 2017, which "impedes the involvement of United Nations agencies in efforts to rebuild Syria until political changes are in effect in that country."

In a collective gasp heard 'round the world, the Western establishment media last week discovered that the Saudi regime is capable of doing evil stuff.

The 'brutal murder' of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey is bizarre on a number of levels, not least because everyone knows about it, yet it's not even confirmed that he's actually dead and not just missing.

US Congress appears to be going straight for the jugular, threatening sanctions against its - to this point, from its perspective - unblemished Middle Eastern ally. So 'sanctions', maybe, but cancelling the weapons sales which sustain the proxy war in Yemen? No way!

In addition to discussing the latest Saudi intrigue, this week's podcast explores the ongoing outbreak of Trump Anxiety Disorder across the West, but primarily in the USA. Joe Quinn elaborates on his idea that the real reason people hate Trump is that he is NOT a liar...


Running Time: 01:03:20

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