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Searching for proof: South Korea seizes second ship suspected of oil trade with North


RT
Sun, 31 Dec 2017 17:13 UTC
oil tanker at sunset
© Jean-Paul Pelissier / Reuters
A Panama-flagged ship suspected of selling oil to North Korea in international waters has been seized by South Korea. Such trade is banned by a UN Security Council resolution targeting Pyongyang for nuclear and missile tests.

The 5,100-ton KOTI tanker was detained by authorities in the port of Pyeongtaek-Dangjin in South Korea's Gyeonggi Province, Yonhap news agency reported. Security and customs officials decided last week not to let the ship leave the port after suspecting it of engaging in ship-to-ship oil trade with North Korea in violation of UN sanctions.

The Sunday report said most of the crew of the KOTI were Chinese and Myanmar nationals. South Korean authorities would not provide details of the ongoing investigation.
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Info

Fort Russ: Everything you need to know about the Iran protest crisis

Joaquin Flores
Fort Russ
Sat, 30 Dec 2017 16:53 UTC
iran protest
Protest in Kermanshah, 12-29-17
Across the websites of the Associated Press, Reuters, and the U.S establishment's own 'Twitter' and 'Facebook', news stories covering apparent violence in Iran and a radical change in the demands of protests have today sprang up, with a tone of extreme urgency.

So what's the problem? And why are Iranians protesting?

Problematic, however, has been any way to independently verify these claims. The Iranian government has generally been clear that there are two unrelated types of protests going on, simultaneously. However, these claims can only be juxtaposed to claims from Iranian 'activists' associated with the radical reformist Green Movement, originally of former Iranian PM Mousavi. But today are themselves divided, and a branch exists today aiding in organizing the smaller protests and 'stunts', which is organized in connection with US support.

But the other branch was actually reeled in, absorbed, tamed, and redirected by Rouhani under the auspices of the Ayatollah Khamenei. At the same time, this had the effect of bringing elements of radical reformism closer to vectors of power than they had been since the mid 1990's.

Comment: HRW's Ken Roth and John McCain are both pushing the regime change agenda, trying to give the impression that the Iranian protesters want what Roth and McCain want, not what they are actually protesting for: economic reforms.

Just as initially peaceful protests in Syria in 2011 turned violent almost immediately after jihadists hijacked them, the same dynamic is happening in Iran. Terrorist group Ansar al-Furaq is calling for an armed uprising against Iran's government:
They also claimed yesterday to have blown up an oil pipeline in Iran's southern Khuzestan province where Iran's Arab minority are mostly concentrated. Meanwhile, Al-Sura News has also reported that the separatist Kurdish Free Life Party (PJAK) has also called for an armed struggle.
Why is it that terrorist groups and American leadership always have the same goals?

See also:

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Info

2017: A year of change... not really

Charles Shoebridge
RT
Sun, 31 Dec 2017 16:45 UTC
2017 in pictures
© Reuters
Charles Shoebridge takes a look at some of the last year's security and foreign policy developments.

The Arrival of Trump

One year ago, expectations for 2017 were running high. Donald Trump was about to take office, and predictions ranged from a new era of US policy pursuing peace and international partnership, to the US becoming a puppet of Russia, and even World War III. Of course, none of these happened, and such forecasts now seem as fanciful as they probably should have at the time.

On the day of his inauguration, I suggested that Trump's evident ignorance of foreign and security issues, combined with his lack of loyal allies within Washington's political establishment, would make him vulnerable to the pressure and influence of the politicians, officials, think tanks, lobbyists, advisors and journalists representing the same special interest groups that had long driven US foreign policy. Within weeks, Trump confirmed senior officials with largely the same hostility for example towards Russia and/or Iran that might have been expected of Hillary Clinton.
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Sherlock

Anti-Trump Lindsey Graham wants new special counsel to investigate FBI, Trump dossier

Alexander Mercouris
The Duran
Sun, 31 Dec 2017 16:45 UTC
fbi hq
Senator Lindsey Graham, previously one of President Trump's most trenchant critics who back in July 2017 actually proposed a law to prohibit President Trump from firing Special Counsel Robert Mueller, has now made the extent of his disillusionment with the FBI's conduct and with the whole Russiagate investigation crystal clear.

In an interview with Fox News Lindsey Graham says that after having reviewed confidential information about the Trump Dossier provided at the insistence of Congressional investigators he is filled with dismay and believes that a new Special Counsel must be appointed to investigate the FBI's conduct and the Trump Dossier.

Comment: You know you've screwed up when even the Never-Trumpers start agreeing with Trump. It looks like Russiagate isn't going to go the way its creators wished.

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Eye 2

Want to know why Trump's troops are training ISIS terrorists?

Eric Zuesse
Strategic Culture Foundation
Sat, 30 Dec 2017 15:53 UTC
ISIS terrorists
When Donald Trump ran for the U.S. Presidency, his biggest foreign-affairs promise (which he copied from Ted Cruz) was to defeat "radical Islamic terrorism"; but, on December 27th, the Russian Government publicly accused Trump's military of backing ISIS terrorists to fight against Syria's Government (which is allied with Russia). Russia's RT international television network headlined "US lets militants train, mount attacks from its Syrian bases - chief of Russian General Staff", and opened:

The US is hosting training camps for militant groups in Syria, including former ISIS fighters who fled from Raqqa, said the head of Russia's General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, citing data obtained by aerial surveillance.

The US forces have effectively turned their military base near the town of al-Tanf in southeastern Syria into a terrorists' training camp, Gerasimov said in an interview to Russia's Komsomolskaya Pravda daily on Wednesday.

"According to satellite and other surveillance data, terrorist squads are stationed there. They are effectively training there," Gerasimov said. ...
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Attention

Ron Paul: U.S. 'On the Verge of 1989's Soviet System Collapse'

Jay Syrmopoulos
Free thought project
Sat, 30 Dec 2017 00:00 UTC
"Anybody who thinks we're not doing too badly has not been flying on an airplane lately. That's about as authoritarian-fascism as you can get," Ron Paul said.
Ron Paul
© TheFreeThoughtProject.com
Never one to shy away from controversy, but often accurate assessments of fact, Ron Paul-who rose to prominence with presidential runs in both 2008 and 2012, running on an anti-war, pro-civil liberties message-made a monumental statement about the current state of the extremely dysfunctional U.S. political system, during an interview with the Washington Examiner, and noted how that could benefit libertarians in 2020. "The big opening for us is the fact that this system is coming apart. We're on the verge of something like what happened in '89 when the Soviet system just collapsed," Paul said. "I'm just hoping our system comes apart as gracefully as the Soviet system."

Comment: See also:

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Snakes in Suits

British Dunning-Kruger means former empire consistently misjudges place in the world

Patrick Cockburn
Independent, UK
Fri, 22 Dec 2017 14:42 UTC
boris johnson
A single stupid remark by a political leader can suddenly illuminate deep and destructive ignorance about important issues. This has happened to me twice recently, the first time during the confrontation between Britain and the EU about the status of Northern Ireland and the Irish border after Brexit. I saw prominent Brexiteer Iain Duncan Smith explaining that the Irish government was hanging tough on negotiations because "the presidential election is coming up". This caused hilarity in Ireland because there is no presidential election in the offing there. The rest of his analysis of what was happening in Ireland, delivered in a self-confident and patronising tone, was equally ill-informed.

Duncan Smith's remarks were significant because they showed that the Brexiteers knew as much about Ireland as they did about Samoa. It never figured in their referendum campaign in 2016 and they have not thought much about it since. For all their supposed devotion to British history, they have forgotten, if they ever knew, that the Irish question has been a central preoccupation of modern British governments from 1880 to 1922 and again from 1968 to 2007. Already there were signs that this issue - the cause of the bloodiest and longest guerrilla war in Western Europe since the Second World War - beginning to re-emerge when Theresa May did a deal with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to give her a majority after the general election. She casually abandoned the British government's neutrality between unionists and nationalists in Northern Ireland, which was essential to its role as a mediator between the two sides.

Comment: Dunning-Kruger:
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein people of low ability suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their cognitive ability as greater than it is. The cognitive bias of illusory superiority derives from the metacognitive inability of low-ability persons to recognize their own ineptitude; without the self-awareness of metacognition, low-ability people cannot objectively evaluate their actual competence or incompetence.


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Chess

State censorship? 'Experts' say Silicon Valley giants playing own game with Trump, Israel

Ekaterina Blinova
Sputnik
Sun, 31 Dec 2017 15:32 UTC
zukerberg facebook
© Associated Press/Jeff ChiuFacebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks at Facebook in Menlo Park, Calif., Sunday, Sept. 27, 2015.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald assumed in his recent article that the Silicon Valley giant Facebook has become a censorship tool for Washington and Tel Aviv. Speaking to Sputnik, Wall Street analyst Charles Ortel and Israeli commentator Avigdor Eskin shared their views on Greenwald's report.

"While Facebook holds itself out as a leading information sharing platform, it certainly is not a 'news' service: In its present form, Facebook should be seen for what it plainly is, a profit-seeking vehicle that derives outsized financial returns monetizing valuable user information for which it pays little," Wall Street analyst and investigative journalist Charles Ortel said, commenting on Glenn Greenwald's latest article exposing the media platform's alleged bias.

On December 30, Greenwald, an investigative journalist, author and co-founder of The Intercept, a media outlet, drew attention to what he sees as nothing short of state censorship being promoted by the social networking giant Facebook.

Comment: When one asks does FB and other social media outlets answer to the government, the question really should be which part of the government? The dog and pony show the people see, or the Deep State that really pulls the strings.

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Light Saber

Trump has waged a yearlong war against Amazon - is a day of reckoning coming soon?

Allan Smith
Business Insider
Fri, 29 Dec 2017 14:01 UTC
trump bezos amazon
"He thinks I'll go after him [Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos] for antitrust," Trump said in May.
President Donald Trump has a pretty clear least favorite company in America: Amazon.

The president again took aim at the e-commerce giant on Friday morning, tweeting that the company was unfairly reaping the benefits of a great deal with the US Postal Service. Trump said the deal was enriching Amazon while making the USPS "dumber and poorer."

"Why is the United States Post Office, which is losing many billions of dollars a year, while charging Amazon and others so little to deliver their packages, making Amazon richer and the Post Office dumber and poorer?" Trump tweeted. "Should be charging MUCH MORE!"

That was just the latest salvo Trump has fired at the internet behemoth.
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Bulb

Putin wishes Russians changes for the better in 2018 and thanks everyone for believing in Russia


TASS
Sun, 31 Dec 2017 12:39 UTC
On the very last minutes of the outgoing year Vladimir Putin urged everyone to tell words of love and care to each other, forgive mistakes and offences, to hug, to warm with care and attention

Putin
© Alexei Druzhinin / Press Service of the Russian President / TASS
President Vladimir Putin in his New Year's Address to the Nation wished Russians important changes, and thanked them for believing in Russia. The President's traditional speech went on air in the easternmost time zone of the country, where the year 2018 has already come.

"For us, New Year is a family holiday. We celebrate it like we did back in childhood: with presents and surprises, with special warmth, expecting important changes. They will come, if we all remember our parents, care for them, value every minute with them, if we continue to understand our children, their aspirations and dreams, to support those who are next to us, those who require our participation and generosity," Putin said.
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