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Iraqi forces clash with Kurds moving closer to regional capital Erbil - State Dept. urges Baghdad to limit movements in disputed areas


RT
Sat, 21 Oct 2017 08:24 UTC
Iraqi forces
© Essam Al-Sudani / Reuters
Iraqi and Kurdish forces have clashed in the town of Altun Kupri on the border of Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region, security official said, as Baghdad continues its offensive in the wake of a controversial referendum on Kurdish independence.

Iraqi security and pro-government militias descended on Altun Kupri, which lies some 50 km (30 miles) to the south of the Kurdish capital, Erbil, early on Friday.

Video footage from the Kurdish front lines showed columns of smoke rising and what sounds like gunshots being heard in the distance.

In a statement, the Peshmerga General Command said it had repelled the Iraqi advance and destroyed a number of vehicles, including an American-made Abrams tank.

Comment: The United States calls on Baghdad to restrict the movement of government troops in northern Iraq to prevent further clashes with Kurdish forces in the area, the State Department said in a press release.
"[W]e urge the central government to calm the situation by limiting federal forces' movements in disputed areas to only those coordinated with the Kurdistan Regional Government," the release said.
...

Also, the department said that the Iraqi government's effort to reassert its authority over Kurdish areas in northern Iraq does not change the disputed status of these territories.

"The reassertion of federal authority over disputed areas in no way changes their status - they remain disputed until their status is resolved in accordance with the Iraqi constitution," the State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert said.

"The United States is concerned by reports of violent clashes around the town of Altun Kupri in northern Iraq. We are monitoring the situation closely, and call on all parties to cease all violence and provocative movements, and to coordinate their activities to restore calm," Nauert said.


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Star of David

Texas officials forcing hurricane victims to pledge loyalty to Israel to receive funding-seriously

Rachel Blevins
The Free Thought Project
Fri, 20 Oct 2017 20:50 UTC
boycottisrael
© Free Thought Project
According to official documents, Hurricane Harvey victims reportedly have to agree to not "boycott Israel," in order to receive aid to rebuild their homes.

As the Americans who were affected by Hurricane Harvey attempt to rebuild their homes and replace their belongings, they have the option to request help from the city they live in-but residents in Dickinson, Texas, are learning that their city's "Harvey Repair Grant" comes with a strange clause.

According to a document titled "Hurricane Harvey Repair Grant Application and Agreement" from the City of Dickinson, in addition to a requirement that the applicant "must adhere to all applicable rules, regulations, and laws, including building codes, safety rules and securing of all required permits," there is also a "verification not to boycott Israel" agreement.

"Verification not to Boycott Israel. By executing this Agreement below, the Applicant verifies that the Applicant: (1) does not boycott Israel; and (2) will not boycott Israel during the term of this Agreement."
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Arrow Down

Putin: US imposed sanctions aim to force Russia out of Europe's energy market


Tass
Thu, 19 Oct 2017 17:59 UTC
Putin at Valdai
The Russian leader noted that international politics is increasingly interfering in economic relations

The latest US sanctions are aimed at forcing Russia out of the European energy market, so that Europe could buy more expensive American liquefied natural gas (LNG), Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club on Thursday.

He noted that international politics is interfering in economic relations. "The recent sanction package adopted by the US Congress is frankly aimed at forcing Russia out of the European energy markets, pushing Europe to switch to more expensive liquefied gas from the US, and there is not enough volume," Putin said.

Comment: The Europeans realize all this too! Unacceptable! Former German Chancellor Schroeder lambastes Washington's economic war against Russian gas supplies to Europe

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Black Cat

Hillary Clinton's Russian Ghost Stories

J. MICHAEL WALLER
Daily Caller
Fri, 20 Oct 2017 02:03 UTC
Hillary clinton
Russian intelligence targeted Hillary Clinton before she became secretary of state in 2009, FBI documents show.

New FBI information about corruption in a Clinton-approved uranium deal with Russia raises questions about Clinton's actions after the FBI broke up a deep-cover Russian spy ring in 2010.

For a decade, the FBI ran an operation called Ghost Stories to monitor and rip apart a deep-cover Russian agent network. Ghost Stories tracked a ring of Russian spies who lived between Boston and Washington, D.C., under false identities. It was one of the FBI's most elaborate and successful counterintelligence operations in history.

After the FBI arrested 10 of the spies in June, 2010, Secretary of State Clinton worked feverishly to return the Russian agents to Moscow in a hastily arranged, lopsided deal with Putin.
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Arrow Up

Trump's base of small-dollar donors fuel surge in Republican fundraising

Anita Kumar
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Thu, 19 Oct 2017 20:24 UTC
trump supporters
© Aaron P. Bernstein/ReutersSupporters cheer as President Trump speaks at a rally in Huntsville, Ala., on Sept. 22.
The Republican National Committee raised more than $100 million in the first nine months of 2017, marking the first time it has raised that much, that fast, in a non-presidential election year.

The record-breaking fundraising can be largely attributed to a flurry of small-dollar donors responding to fundraising appeals by the first Republican president in eight years, Donald Trump, according to a new report to be released later this week and obtained by McClatchy.

The numbers give Republicans a large cash advantage over Democrats as they look to retain control of both chambers of Congress in the midterm elections next year.

Last month, the RNC hired state directors in 17 states across the nation, including Florida, Missouri and North Carolina, as part of what the party says will be the most expansive midterm field program in its history.
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Briefcase

Co-founders of 'dodgy dossier' source Fusion GPS take the Fifth during House Intel appearance

Chuck Ross
The Daily Caller
Wed, 18 Oct 2017 20:06 UTC
Fusion GPS Russiagate
© Reuters/Aaron P. BernsteinUS House Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) and Ranking Member Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) speak with the media about the ongoing Russia investigation on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S. March 15, 2017.
Two of the co-founders of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm behind the infamous Trump dossier, invoked their Fifth Amendment rights during a meeting with the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, a person familiar with the matter told The Daily Caller.

Peter Fritsch and Thomas Catan, the two Fusion GPS partners, plead the Fifth "to every question asked of them," the source says.

The House panel earlier this month subpoenaed Fritsch, Catan and their fellow partner, Glenn Simpson, to discuss their involvement in the dossier, which was compiled last year by former British spy Christopher Steele.

In a letter to California Rep. Devin Nunes earlier this week, Fusion's attorneys suggested that the three partners, all former Wall Street Journal reporters, would refuse to cooperate with the committee, citing First Amendment protections and confidentiality agreements.

It was unclear from that letter whether the Fusion partners planned to plead the Fifth, which protects witnesses from self-incrimination.

Comment: Trump questions who is funding Fusion's activities :
President Trump went after Fusion GPS on Twitter on Thursday, questioning who paid the opposition research firm for producing the infamous anti-Trump dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele.

"Workers of firm involved with the discredited and Fake Dossier take the 5th. Who paid for it, Russia, the FBI or the Dems (or all)?" Trump asked.


On Wednesday, two of Fusion GPS' co-founders, Peter Fritsch and Thomas Catan, invoked their Fifth Amendment privileges during an interview with investigators on the House Intelligence Committee.

Fritsch, Catan and a third partner, Glenn Simpson, had been subpoenaed earlier this month by the committee, which is investigating Russian interference in the presidential campaign.

The firm's lawyers protested the subpoena, arguing that the three partners were protected from revealing information about their work on the dossier by the First Amendment as well as confidentiality agreements with their clients.

One of the questions that Fusion has sought to avoid is the identity of the clients who hired them to investigate Trump.

The firm initially began investigating Trump in Sept. 2015 on behalf of a Republican donor who opposed the real estate baron. After Trump won the GOP nomination, an ally of Hillary Clinton's hired Fusion, which is based in Washington, D.C.

Fusion then hired Steele, who is based in London.

Trump's mention of the FBI is likely a reference to reports that the bureau struck an informal agreement last October with Steele to pay the former MI6 agent $50,000 to continue his investigation of Trump. That payment was reportedly never made.

There is no evidence that Russia paid Fusion to produce the dossier, though while the company was investigating Trump, it was also working on a project linked to Russian operatives. Fusion was hired by a lawyer for a Russian businessman named Denis Katsyv to investigate Bill Browder, a London businessman who was behind the Magnitsky Act, a sanctions bill that is vehemently opposed by the Kremlin.

Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin were involved in that project. Both of the operatives, who many believe have links to the Kremlin, attended the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting held with Donald Trump Jr. The Daily Caller has been told that Fusion's Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, has known Akhmetshin for more than a decade.

Last year, Browder filed a complaint with the Justice Department alleging that Fusion GPS was working for the Russian government and had failed to register as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Fusion has denied the claim.
Bill Browder is a singularly slimy character. No surprise he is mixed up in this affair:

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Eye 1

Flashback How covert agents infiltrate the internet to manipulate, deceive, and destroy reputations

Glenn Greenwald
The Intercept
Mon, 24 Feb 2014 13:04 UTC
Image
A page from a GCHQ top secret document prepared by its secretive JTRIG unit
One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It's time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents.

Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about "dirty trick" tactics used by GCHQ's previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four classified GCHQ documents presented to the NSA and the other three partners in the English-speaking "Five Eyes" alliance. Today, we at the Intercept are publishing another new JTRIG document, in full, entitled "The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations."

By publishing these stories one by one, our NBC reporting highlighted some of the key, discrete revelations: the monitoring of YouTube and Blogger, the targeting of Anonymous with the very same DDoS attacks they accuse "hacktivists" of using, the use of "honey traps" (luring people into compromising situations using sex) and destructive viruses. But, here, I want to focus and elaborate on the overarching point revealed by all of these documents: namely, that these agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the internet itself.
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Info

John Kelly gives heartfelt account of a soldier's death - Frederica Wilson laughs, says he's just "trying to keep his job"

Alex Christoforou
The Duran
Fri, 20 Oct 2017 19:03 UTC
john kelly
© Brendan Smialowski / AFP
Florida Democratic Congresswoman Frederica Wilson wanted fame and praise from "the resistance" and now she has a lot more than what she bargained for thanks to General John Kelly.

Trump Chief of Staff, Gold Star father, and US General John Kelly crushed Wilson during a White House press conference.

Tucker Carlson notes that Kelly's words echoed a better age, and called out Wilson's hypocrisy during an FBI dedication in Miami.
Forgotten in the controversy over how Trump's alleged insensitivity in consoling a soldier's widow is the fact that a private, sacred moment was violated. John Kelly, whose own son died in battle, reminded everyone of that.

Comment: Like him or not, Kelly took the moral high ground, dug in deep, and eviscerated Wilson's selfish behavior. Watch for yourself (Kelly starts at 2:15):



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Snakes in Suits

Unbridled hypocrisy: Former Presidents Obama and Bush blast the current state of American politics

Allan Smith
Business Insider
Fri, 20 Oct 2017 02:47 UTC
George Bush, Barack Obama
© Getty
The two most recent former US presidents on Thursday blasted the state of US politics in events that were separated by less than 20 miles.

First, it was former President George W. Bush. The most recent former Republican president lambasted a political culture that he said caused "bigotry" to seem "emboldened." The public comments were Bush's most pointed since President Donald Trump took office in January.

"In recent decades, public confidence in our institutions has declined," the 43rd president said at an event in New York hosted by his namesake institute. "Our governing class has often been paralyzed in the face of obvious and pressing needs. The American dream of upward mobility seems out of reach for some who feel left behind in a changing economy. Discontent deepened and sharpened partisan conflicts. Bigotry seems emboldened. Our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication."

Comment: Such statements are indeed rich coming from two corrupt warmongering Deep State puppets.

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Георгиевская ленточка

Putin at Valdai: "Russia will not allow Donbass to be massacred"

Eduard Popov, translated by J. Arnoldski
Fort Russ
Fri, 20 Oct 2017 18:24 UTC
Putin Valdai 2017
© Alexander Zemlianichenko, APRussian President Vladimir Putin gestures speaking at a meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club in Sochi, Russia, on Thursday, Oct. 19, 2017.
On October 19th, at a session of the Valdai discussion club, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a number of important and even programmatic statements concerning not only current issues, but also the conceptual foundations of relations between Russia and the West. While these statements deserve a separate, larger article altogether, here we will limit ourselves to analyzing President Putin's statements on the situation in and around Donbass.

According to Putin, Ukraine must grant the Donbass republics a special status and adopt an amnesty law in order to resolve the conflict in East Ukraine. If this is not done, he argued, then any seizure of the border between Russia and the unrecognized republics would lead only to a tragedy comparable to the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina. "There would be a massacre. But we will not allow this," Putin said.

The Russian leader also reiterated that the current situation in Ukraine is none other than the result of the unconstitutional, armed seizure of power in Kiev which was supported by the West.
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