Almost five months after the US presidential elections, Fox News made a startling and shocking revelation: the Kremlin, Russian intelligence agencies, paid and unpaid Russian Internet trolls and Santa HAD NOT influenced the election process.

Earlier a number of prominent members of the US Democratic Party sought to blame Russia for allegedly intervening in the 2016 US Presidential elections via hacking and a targeted misinformation campaign.

Last week, the Senate Intelligence Committee announced that Moscow managed to swing votes in several key states by manipulating 'fake news.'

The editors at the Wall Street Journal have settled on a plan for ending the crisis in North Korea. Starve them to death.

I'm not kidding. In an article titled "Options for Removing Kim Jong In" the WSJ's editorial board suggests that the US use "all of its tools to topple the North Korean regime" including, of course, vital food imports which keep women and children from facing an agonizing death by starvation. Here's an excerpt from the article:

"The North is especially vulnerable to pressure this year because a severe drought from April to June reduced the early grain harvest by 30%. If the main harvest is also affected, Pyongyang may need to import more food while sanctions restrict its ability to earn foreign currency....

While the regime survived a severe famine in the 1990s, today the political consequences of a failed harvest would be severe. .... The army was once the most desirable career path; now soldiers are underpaid and underfed. North Koreans will not simply accept starvation as they did two decades ago.

Withholding food aid to bring down a government would normally be unethical, but North Korea is an exceptional case. Past aid proved to be a mistake as it perpetuated one of the most evil regimes in history. The U.N. says some 40% of the population is undernourished, even as the Kims continue to spend huge sums on weapons. Ending the North Korean state as quickly as possible is the most humane course."

("Options for Removing Kim Jong In", Wall Street Journal)

"Humane"? The WSJ editors think that depriving people of enough food to stay alive is humane?

And look how cheery they sound about the fact that "40% of the population is (already) undernourished", as if they're already halfway towards their goal. Hurrah for the US embargo, still inflicting misery on innocent people some 6 decades after the war!

It's sick!

Now is the time for a gallant peace gesture from Washington or for Seoul to quit the war games - twice-yearly events, dating back to 1976, in which US and South Korean military forces deploy thousands of troops to simulate various scenarios for conflict with the North.

This summer's games involved 17,500 US troops and 50,000 South Koreans. To North Korea the games simulate invasion. War games with a specific offensive objective violate the UN Charter, that is, international law.

The current mutual oppositional defiance between Pyongyang and Washington has evoked alarmist reactions and feverish talk from all parties except China, which has sensibly proposed a dual freeze: The US stops its perennial war games; North Korea stops testing missiles and nuclear weapons.

In China this is a moderate position between those sympathetic to North Korea and those who want Beijing to take a hard line as Washington insists. Former US defense secretary William Perry, who once advocated pre-emptive strikes, agrees with a mutual freeze. In an August 1 editorial, The New York Times cited experts who endorse the freeze. So why not?

Introduction

Clearly the US has escalated the pivotal role of the military in the making of foreign and, by extension, domestic policy. The rise of 'the Generals' to strategic positions in the Trump regime is evident, deepening its role as a highly autonomous force determining US strategic policy agendas.

In this paper we will discuss the advantages that the military elite accumulate from the war agenda and the reasons why 'the Generals' have been able to impose their definition of international realities.

We will discuss the military's ascendancy over Trump's civilian regime as a result of the relentless degradation of his presidency by his political opposition.

The media is less interested in Obama Administration wiretapping than in how Trump described it...

This week CNN is reporting more details on the Obama Administration's 2016 surveillance of people connected to the presidential campaign of the party out of power. It seems that once President Obama's appointee to run the FBI, James Comey, had secured authorization for wiretapping, the bureau continued its surveillance into 2017. CNN reports:

US investigators wiretapped former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort under secret court orders before and after the election, sources tell CNN, an extraordinary step involving a high-ranking campaign official now at the center of the Russia meddling probe.

The government snooping continued into early this year, including a period when Manafort was known to talk to President Donald Trump.

Some of the intelligence collected includes communications that sparked concerns among investigators that Manafort had encouraged the Russians to help with the campaign, according to three sources familiar with the investigation. Two of these sources, however, cautioned that the evidence is not conclusive.

This means the wiretapping was authorized more than ten months ago and perhaps more than a year ago.

Russian warplanes and Syrian forces have repelled an offensive by jihadists in a de-escalation zone in Idlib governorate in Syria. The forces killed some 850 militants and destroyed 11 tanks and other assets, Russia's General Staff reported.

The offensive was launched by the militant group formerly called Al-Nusra Front and its allies on Tuesday morning, a statement from the General Staff said.

The jihadists attacked the positions of government forces stationed to the north and northeast of the city of Hama. The positions are part of a designated de-escalation zone, which covers Idlib governorate, the powerbase of a number of anti-government armed groups in Syria, the Russian military said.

Donald Trump's speech at the UN, in which he threatened to "totally destroy" North Korea if necessary, has been slammed by progressive organizations calling it a "complete failure of American leadership" and "yet another reckless escalation."

The three organizations - MoveOn.org, CREDO Action, and Win Without War - blasted Trump's speech in a joint statement published on Tuesday.

"Donald Trump's first speech to the United Nations General Assembly today - and in particular, his remarks about North Korea - was nothing short of a complete failure of American leadership," the statement reads.


It adds that Trump threatened to "totally destroy North Korea" instead of "focusing on efforts to peacefully resolve the crisis surrounding its nuclear program."


The organizations said it is "time for this charade to end," calling it a "slow roll towards a catastrophic war" and stressing the need to solve the crisis diplomatically.

The US begrudges North Korea for having a few nuclear weapons while having more nuclear weapons than any country on Earth, Prof. Dan Kovalik, the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, told RT, commenting on Donald Trump's UN address. Other analysts joined the discussion.

Donald Trump delivered his first address to the UN General Assembly (UNGA) on Tuesday. The US president lashed out at North Korea, Syria and Iran in his speech.

Dan Kovalik says he doesn't think it's appropriate to speak about defending the interests of one particular nation, America, at the UN.

Dan Kovalik: It shows a tone-deafness in Donald Trump - that he can't even read his audience, which is the nations of the world. It is a body that is designed to encourage cooperation between countries and primarily to avoid war and the threat of war, which Trump engaged in while he was on stage - that is a threat of war against [North] Korea.

The White House says U.S. President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping committed to "maximizing pressure on North Korea" amid an escalating crisis over Pyongyang's ballistic and nuclear tests.

The White House said the two leaders discussed "North Korea's continued defiance of the international community and its efforts to destabilize Northeast Asia," in a phone conversation on September 18.

Trump is in New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly but Xi -- who has a major Communist Party congress that will cement his leadership for the next five years -- has skipped the event.

CIA agent William Basil will be charged in Greece on the case of espionage and wiretapping of former Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis, local media reported Monday, citing anonymous sources.

The warrant for the arrest of a 65-year-old US citizen - a former employee of the US Embassy in Greece - in the wiretapping case was issued in February 2015. As reported, the US citizen of Greek origin was a CIA agent in Athens from mid-1990s. The investigation believes that in the summer of 2004 he bought four mobile phones in a store in Piraeus, of which three were used for wiretapping.

The Council of Judges of the Athens Criminal Court has signed a decree on transferring the CIA agent's case to the Athens Court of Appeal with serious charges of espionage and unlawful receipt of information constituting state secrets, the Greek Dimokratiya newspaper said.