Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lovfen has refuted the speculations that Sweden's recent military activity on the island of Gotland located in Baltic Sea was caused by the growing threat coming from Russia.

"We experience no direct threat against Sweden," Lovfen told a news conference on the sidelines of the UN Summit for Refugees and Migrants, Swedish Expressen reported.

The comment comes following the news that Sweden is to station a permanent garrison of 150 soldiers on the island one year ahead of schedule, local newspaper Dagens Nyheter (DN) reported Monday.

"The situation in Europe is generally uncertain, especially in the Baltic Sea. We have been discussing the issue of defense and agreed that we must increase our military capacity. We simply follow the line we have started," Löfven said.

One knows to be on one's guard immediately one hears that the USA and the European Union are negotiating some 'big deal' on transatlantic trade. Sure, big deal - in trading terms - typically means big power, big money and big mess. But when one also hears that it's all being done in secret, then one has to add 'big scam' too.

The designers of the trade agreements claim that they will bring greater GDP and more jobs at both ends; a view which has been widely challenged by those likely to be on the receiving end.

So let's spell it out: TTIP stands for Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. It's Big Brother brokering new trade deals between the USA and the European Union. CETA stands for Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement. It is pretty much the same deal, but is being brokered by Canada and the European Union. And lastly there's TISA, for Trade in Services Agreement, also involving the USA and EU, with some other countries in on the act. Here, it is 'services' that are under the spotlight.

Before the breakdown of the ceasefire agreement, on Saturday the 17th of September, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the United States faced difficulties in Syria, because they can not separate "healthy" opposition from semi-criminal and terrorist organizations.

"This is due to the difficulties faced by the United States on the Syrian track. The difficulty lies in the fact that they can not separate the so-called healthy part of the opposition from the semi-criminal and terrorist elements ", the RIA quotes Putin as saying.

According to Putin, the United States benefits from maintaining this confusion, to bolster the combat potential in their actual fight against Syrian President Bashar Assad.

"In my opinion, this is dictated by the desire to maintain the combat potential in the fight against the legitimate government of President Assad, but it is a very dangerous road, we talked a lot about it. It seems that our American partners are again stepping on the same rake, which they attacked repeatedly. This is a dangerous direction of development ", he stressed.
Commenting on the situation with the US reluctance to reveal the essence of the agreement with Russia on Syria, Putin said that it is not surprised by the position of Washington.

At this point, our readers should be intimately familiar with the timeline leading up to the "Oh Shit" moment when the Platte River Networks employee, Paul Combetta, deleted Hillary's emails despite later admitting to the FBI that he "was aware of the existence of the preservation request and the fact that it meant he should not disturb Clinton's e-mail data on the PRN server" (if not, see "The "Oh Shit" Moment: Hillary Wiped Her Server With BleachBit Despite Subpoena"). Once Combetta was summoned to testify in front of Congress, we also learned that the FBI had granted Combetta an immunity deal (see "The "Oh Shit" Guy That Wiped Hillary's Server With BleachBit Was Just Granted Immunity").

Well, the plot just continues to thicken around the "Oh Shit" guy as a political researcher just posted the following tweet that exposes a Reddit thread from July 2014 in which Combetta sought tech advice on how to "strip out a VIP's (VERY VIP) email address from a bunch of archived emails."

A series of joint drills held by the Russian and Chinese navies has come to an end on Monday. The exercises culminated with a spectacular amphibious and air landing operation on an island off the coast of China's southern Guangdong Province.

Monday may have been the last day of the Joint Sea 2016 naval drills, but the troops from both countries were in no mood for a holiday, despite the tropical setting.

They were deeply focused on undertaking a series of challenging exercises, which would test their abilities in near live combat situations. However, a senior officer told China's Xinhua news agency that the drills were even carried out in a "background of actual combat," which shows how seriously they were being taken.

A former US Army Ranger over at Sofrep.com which bills itself as a kind of unofficial newsletter of the US Special Forces has a fascinating scoop on the attitudes of American soldiers to their Syria training mission. Read the opening paragraph:

"Nobody believes in it. You're like, 'Fuck this,'" a former Green Beret says of America's covert and clandestine programs to train and arm Syrian militias. "Everyone on the ground knows they are jihadis. No one on the ground believes in this mission or this effort, and they know they are just training the next generation of jihadis, so they are sabotaging it by saying, 'Fuck it, who cares?'"

That's right. Reportedly US special forces on the ground detest the work they've been ordered to do. The 7,000-word article is really much more than that -- it chronicles much of the CIA's war in Iraq and Syria including its early failure to take the ISIS threat seriously, and its continued failure to devote meaningful resources to going after the group. Instead, Murphy explains CIA has kicked that job to Special Operations Forces while becoming obsessed with toppling the Syrian government:

ISIS was now on the CIA's radar. CTC [CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center] targeted the organization, but not often enough to have any tangible effect on the battle space. Toward the end of 2014, the CIA had less than 20 targeting officers and analysts dedicated to fighting ISIS. As of early 2016, the situation had improved little. According to several sources, the CIA simply does not care about ISIS. Using an excuse that ISIS is an army rather than a terrorist organization, they have punted the job to Army special operations-the men of Special Forces and Delta Force.

In Syria, the overwhelming priority for the CIA is what some CTC officers call Director John Brennan's baby: the removal of the Assad regime.

The pinnacle of the global financial system is warning that conditions are right for a "full-blown banking crisis" in China. Since the last financial crisis, there has been a credit boom in China that is really unprecedented in world history. At this point the total value of all outstanding loans in China has hit a grand total of more than 28 trillion dollars. That is essentially equivalent to the commercial banking systems of the United States and Japan combined. While it is true that government debt is under control in China, corporate debt is now 171 percent of GDP, and it is only a matter of time before that debt bubble horribly bursts. The situation in China has already grown so dire that the Bank for International Settlements is sounding the alarm...

A key gauge of credit vulnerability is now three times over the danger threshold and has continued to deteriorate, despite pledges by Chinese premier Li Keqiang to wean the economy off debt-driven growth before it is too late.

The Bank for International Settlements warned in its quarterly report that China's "credit to GDP gap" has reached 30.1, the highest to date and in a different league altogether from any other major country tracked by the institution. It is also significantly higher than the scores in East Asia's speculative boom on 1997 or in the US subprime bubble before the Lehman crisis.

Studies of earlier banking crises around the world over the last sixty years suggest that any score above ten requires careful monitoring.

With no party yet found responsible for the alleged airstrike on the humanitarian aid convoy west of Aleppo, which killed several Syrian Red Crescent volunteers, the US State Department was quick to vent its outrage, blaming Damascus and Moscow for the attack.

A joint UN and Syrian Red Crescent (SARC) 31-truck humanitarian convoy delivering aid was bombed in five alleged airstrikes while offloading supplies in the Syrian town of Urm al-Kubra. At least 18 vehicles were hit, according to the UN.


As result of the attack, the mission's chief and several other workers suffered severe injuries, a witness told Reuters. The convoy was carrying humanitarian cargo to some 78,000 civilians stranded in the war-stricken town.

While no party has claimed responsibility for the attack, pro-rebel groups rushed to blame the incident on government forces, claiming it was either a Syrian or a Russian warplane that carried out the strike.

The Lavrov - Kerry agreement has collapsed.

The ceasefire the agreement was supposed to put in place has never come into effect. The Jihadis - far from separating themselves from Jabhat Al-Nusra as they were required by the Lavrov Kerry agreement to do - instead united with Jabhat Al-Nusra and have exploited the Syrian military's temporary stand-down to launch more attacks on Aleppo.

Further east near Deir Ezzor the US air force attacked Syrian military positions defending the city's airport, allowing a Syrian defence line to be overrun by ISIS fighters. I have already explained why I do not believe that this attack was a mistake.


Perhaps not coincidentally, at a time when the US was on the diplomatic defensive over its air strike on Deir Ezzor, reports have appeared of an attack on a convoy providing relief supplies near Aleppo.

The US is accusing either the Russians or the Syrians of launching an air strike against this convoy. The Russians and the Syrians deny this and are hinting that the convoy was not attacked by aircraft at all but was attacked by ground missiles launched by local Jihadi fighters.


Regardless of the truth about this incident, amidst a deteriorating military picture movement of all relief convoys across Syria has now been brought to a stop.

France's National Assembly has issued a report calling for 65 measures to be introduced at abattoirs to improve transparency and remove "inadequate controls" at the facilities. The measures will include setting up CCTV cameras.

The report contains 225 pages, French Le Monde newspaper has reported.

Installing video cameras was among the measures proposed, with the deputies saying the step was needed to monitor animals' welfare and not workers.

Another move would be to provide more qualified veterinarians at the facilities, in particular during stunning and killing.

The report was first commissioned in March, but comes after a shocking video was released of a slaughterhouse, containing all the gory details of the killing of the animals there.