Puppet MastersS


Pirates

UK Defense Secretary Michael Fallon claims 2mn people freed from ISIS rule in last year


RT
Mon, 16 Jan 2017 18:49 UTC
Islamic state fighters on the border between Syria and Iraq
© Medyan Dairieh / www.globallookpress.comIslamic state fighters on the border between Syria and Iraq
Two million people have been liberated from Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) rule in the last 12 months, according to UK Defense Secretary Sir Michael Fallon.

In a Ministry of Defense (MoD) statement, Fallon said the US-led coalition has made substantial progress in Syria and Iraq.

"In the last year, over two million people have been freed from Daesh [IS] rule by Iraqi and moderate Syrian Democratic Forces, backed by coalition air power," Fallon claimed.


"Britain is stepping up in the fight against Daesh: the Army has helped train over 32,000 Iraqi forces — and, in a controlled and precise manner, the RAF is taking out Daesh and working hard to minimize casualties in a very difficult, dense urban environment.

"Working with allies we will keep momentum, push Daesh out of Mosul, encircle Raqqa and eventually end Daesh's reign of terror," he said.
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Snakes in Suits

In final visit to Kyiv, Biden says world must stand against Russian aggression

Christopher Miller
RFE/RL
Mon, 16 Jan 2017 18:25 UTC
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden (left) waves after a joint press conference with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Kyiv on January 16
© Official websiteU.S. Vice President Joe Biden (left) waves after a joint press conference with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Kyiv on January 16
Making his final visit to Kyiv in eight years as U.S. vice president, Joe Biden urged the international community to stand against what he called Russian aggression and urged the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump to be a strong supporter of Ukraine.

Biden's visit, his sixth during President Barack Obama's eight years in office and fifth since Moscow-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych fled in the face of the Euromaidan protests in February 2014 and a pro-Western government came to power, came four days before Trump's January 20 inauguration.


Comment: Or, as really happened, a US backed coup toppled the elected government and installed a government of neo-nazis.


Speaking alongside Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, whom he described as his "good friend," Biden said U.S. sanctions imposed on Russia for its seizure of the Crimean Peninsula and its involvement in a war between government forces and pro-Moscow separatists in eastern Ukraine must remain in place until Moscow fully implements its commitments under a 2015 peace deal known as the Minsk accords.


Comment: Only problem is, Russia did not seize Crimea. Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to return to Russia, rather than be persecuted by the Russian hating neo-nazis in Kiev.


Biden said he knows it is hard to find faith in the Minsk process when Russia refuses to hold up its end of the deal, in his words, but he emphasized that it is "Ukraine's best hope to move forward as a united country."


Comment: Only problem is that Kiev has repeatedly violated the agreement and attacked the rebel regions.

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Chess

Russian senator: Russia won't sacrifice its security in exchange for lifting of Western sanctions


RT
Mon, 16 Jan 2017 17:20 UTC
Russian RT-2PM missile
© Alexandr Kryazhev / SputnikThe RT-2PM Topol ballistic missile in a testing area in the Novosibirsk Region.
The lifting of Western sanctions has no separate value and is not even a strategic goal that requires sacrifices in the sphere of strategic security, the head of the upper house's Committee for International Relations says.

"The cancellation of sanctions is definitely not an end in itself. It is not even a strategic goal for Russia that requires some sacrifice, especially in the sphere of security," Senator Konstantin Kosachev was quoted as saying by RIA Novosti.

"We consider the sanctions an ill legacy of the team that is departing from the White House, that should be made history along with this team," he added.

The comments came shortly after US President-elect Donald Trump said in an interview with the Times and Bild newspapers that Western sanctions against Russia could be lifted in exchange for some agreement on nuclear disarmament.

Comment: See also: Russian MP advises Trump not to use sanctions to pressure Moscow

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Info

Britain refuses to sign Paris declaration for Israel-Palestine 'two state solution'


RT
Mon, 16 Jan 2017 17:30 UTC
Francois Hollande delivers a speech at the Mideast peace conference
© Bertrand Guay / ReutersFrench President Francois Hollande delivers a speech at the Mideast peace conference in Paris, France, January 15, 2017.
British officials rebelled during a Paris peace conference last weekend, refusing to sign a joint agreement supporting negotiations for a two-state solution for Israel-Palestine.

The 70-nation-strong meeting was dubbed by many as "useless" and ignored by most main players in the conflict, but nothing seemed to cause more controversy than the UK's claim that the conference could make the Palestinian camp more difficult to work with.


Comment: 70 nations gather in Paris to discuss two-state solution but Israel and Palestinian Authority skip it

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Attention

US Marines arrive in Norway signaling departure from post-WW2 commitment to Russia


RT
Mon, 16 Jan 2017 17:14 UTC
U.S. Marines from 3rd Marine Expeditionary Force
© Woohae Cho / Getty Images
Almost 300 US Marines from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, arrived in Norway on Monday. The deployment signals a departure from the NATO member's decades-old policy of not hosting foreign troops on its soil.

The agreement for stationing the American troops will last for at least a year. The contingent that has come this week will be rotated in six months. The Marines will be hosted at the Vaernes base of the Norwegian Home Guards near Trondheim, Norway's third-largest city.

The stated goal of the mission is to train the US troops in Arctic warfare.

"For the first four weeks they will have basic winter training, learn how to cope with skis and to survive in the Arctic environment," said Rune Haarstad, a Home Guard spokesman, as cited by Reuters. "It has nothing to do with Russia or the current situation."


Comment: What threat? Russia 'puzzled' by Norway's decision to host US Marines in violation of decades-old commitment


Comment: Now we have: US occupation: American troops in Europe to outnumber all European troops combined which creates 'Russian threat' great for business: Norway to buy a dozen more F-35s

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Attention

Crimea drafts UN resolution accusing Ukraine of committing human rights violations


RT
Mon, 16 Jan 2017 15:14 UTC
Pedestrians on an embankment in Yalta in January.
© Sergey Malgavko / Sputnik Pedestrians on an embankment in Yalta in January.
The Crimean State Committee for Inter-Ethnic relations has prepared a draft resolution detailing numerous violations of human rights committed in the republic by the Kiev regime before it seceded from Ukraine and voted to join the Russian Federation.

Zaur Smirnov, the head of the committee, said in an interview with TASS that Crimean human rights activists, political scientists, and lawyers who worked on the resolution's draft planned to present it to the public later this week and then submit it to the United Nations.

"The resolution reflects the whole series of events that took place in Crimea during the Ukrainian period of its history. In particular, it contains a detailed description of the repatriation of Crimean Tatars with all violations of their rights. Of course, we also cover the Ukrainian period as a whole and pay special attention to the 2014 coup d'etat," Smirnov told reporters.

Comment: Good luck with that - the significant influence the US exerts at the UN will likely guarantee this resolution goes nowhere.

Reality distortion: Moscow slams Ukraine-sponsored Crimea resolution passed by UN

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Snakes in Suits

Samsung chief faces arrest for bribery and embezzlement


RT
Mon, 16 Jan 2017 17:07 UTC
Samsung group headquarters in Seoul
© JUNG Yeon-Je / AFP
South Korea's special prosecutors are seeking to arrest the head of Samsung Group Jay Y. Lee over allegations of bribery involving President Park Geun-hye and her secret confidante Choi Soon-Sil.

Jay Y. Lee is suspected of paying up to $36.42 million (43 billion won) in bribes to Choi Soon-sil in return for governmental approval of controversial mergers.

Choi Soon-Sil s at the center of the corruption scandal and allegedly used the money donated by the county's biggest conglomerates for the president's private benefit. Choi has repeatedly denied the accusations.


Comment: Samsung chief questioned as suspect in South Korea national corruption scandal

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Attention

Military commander: Iran shoots at drone flying over central Tehran


RT
Mon, 16 Jan 2017 18:02 UTC
A drone
© Beawiharta / Reuters
Iranian anti-aircraft troops fired shots at a drone as it was flying over central Tehran on Monday, the governor of Tehran Province was quoted as saying by Tasnim news agency. A similar incident happened in December.

"It was not a military drone. It entered the no-fly zone...We do not know where it belonged to," Isa Farhadi was reported as saying.


Alleged footage of the incident leaked online showed an anti-aircraft cannon firing in bursts at an unseen target in the air.


According to Fars news agency, the drone was successfully shot down. But Alireza Elhami, a commander in Iran's anti-aircraft forces, told Tasnim that the drone left after warning shots. He added that the drone was a quadcopter.
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MIB

The CIA and Donald Trump: The blackmail attempt that failed

Alexander Mercouris
The Duran
Mon, 16 Jan 2017 16:50 UTC
trump christopher steele dossier
Donald Trump (right) has denied explosive allegations contained in a dossier compiled by former MI6 spy Christopher Steele
With hindsight the Trump Dossier episode looks like a failed attempt by the CIA to blackmail Donald Trump into toeing the line on Russia. The CIA however underestimated Trump and misjudged his reaction, resulting in a suffering a debacle.

As the days have passed since the publication of the Trump Dossier it has become increasingly clear that we have witnessed what Donald Trump at least believes was a failed attempt to blackmail him, and it was not done by Russia.

I have already explained why the Trump Dossier is an obvious fake, why the claims its contents could not be verified are nonsense, and why the US intelligence community's frantic efforts to distance themselves from its publication do not stand up.

It is not difficult to see how Donald Trump added this all up together and concluded that this was an attempt by the US intelligence community to blackmail him into changing his policy on Russia.
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Георгиевская ленточка

Losing the Russian patsy

Geoff Dutton
CounterPunch
Fri, 13 Jan 2017 16:50 UTC
Russian and US Flags
"We are going to do a terrible thing to you—we are going to deprive you of an enemy."

~ Georgi Arbatov, director of the Soviet Academy of Sciences' Institute for U.S and Canada Studies, 1988
The Soviet Union was the most militarily powerful enemy the United States has ever faced, and after its demise in 1990, US foreign policy and military strategy hasn't done so well. Since Grenada, the US has lost or stalemated every armed conflict it engaged in. (Let's not count Libya—it had already surrendered before we decided to bomb it.) We still have holdovers from the Axis of Evil—Syria, North Korea, and Cuba—that we can't seem to defeat. Nixon lost China and Obama gave up on Cuba, yet it seems our leaders still cling to the notion of bringing Russia into America's orbit. This will be news to many people, but that objective—turning Russia into a US client state—has smoldered among the best and the brightest of our militarists since 1990. The election of Donald Trump has smothered but not extinguished that beacon of hope. Throughout all those decades "we will deprive you of an enemy" has met a chorus of murmurs saying "hold on, not so fast; we're not done with you yet..."

Now that we "know" that the Russians hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton advisor John Podesta and released them on Wikileaks, a chorus of outrage has swelled from the swells of Washington and editorial pages across the nation. Of course the recently-released joint intelligence report doesn't provide any real proof (that would reveal "sources and methods" don't you know), but that's enough to convince the masses that Vladimir Putin aims to sabotage American democracy.
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