Puppet MastersS


Cards

Tony Blair rules out return to frontline politics, backseat role still in the cards

Tony Blair
© Neil Hall / ReutersFormer British Prime Minister Tony Blair
Iraq War-era Prime Minister Tony Blair has ruled out the possibility of returning to frontline politics, as he's aware that the media would "literally move to destroy mode," but a backseat role could still be in the cards.

In an interview with the New Statesman, the former Labour leader confirmed that he wanted to return to politics given the current state of world affairs.Although he has been "dismayed" by recent political events, Blair said he does not want a role in the Brexit negotiations, "or to lead the resistance to it."

The comments follow speculation among political pundits that Blair is plotting a comeback in the face of Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn's Labour leadership.

However, he told the current affairs magazine that he is only interested in reviving the "progressive center or center left."

Comment: See also:


Info

Erdogan warns again: Accuses EU of betrayal, threatens to open borders for migrants

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan
© Brendan McDermid / Reuters
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has warned that his government will open its border gates to allow migrants to flow into Europe if it is pushed any further by the EU. It comes after lawmakers in the bloc voted to halt membership talks with Ankara.

"We are the ones who feed 3-3.5 million refugees in this country. You have betrayed your promises," Erdogan told the EU, as quoted by AP. "If you go any further those border gates will be opened."

He also accused the EU of not treating people fairly, claiming it "never treated humanity honestly" and "did not pick up babies when they washed ashore on the Mediterranean...," Hurriyet reported.

Snakes in Suits

France bids au revoir to top earners

French President Francois Hollande
© Gonzalo Fuentes / Reuters
A new report from the French Parliament's Finance Commission shows thousands of France's top earners are leaving the country.

More than 4,000 households left France in 2014 (it's the most recent year with available statistics), according to Les Echos newspaper which has obtained the report.

For those earning over €100,000 the trend has continued since 2007.

In 2014, about 589 people earning over €300,000 a year left the country. The figure was down from 659 the year before.

For those earning €700,000 or more per year, 127 people said 'au revoir' to France in 2014, down from 179 people a year earlier.

Better Earth

Russia, Philippines to hold talks on defense cooperation agreement

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte
© Mikhail Klimentyev / ReutersRussian President Vladimir Putin and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte attend a meeting on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in Lima, Peru, November 19, 2016
Russia and the Philippines will hold talks on signing a defense cooperation agreement, according to a government decree, signed by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.

The decree was published on the government's website.

"To accept the proposal of the Russian Ministry of Defense, together with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to negotiate an agreement between the Russian Ministry of Defense and the Department of National Defense of the Philippines on defense co-operation," the document read.

On November 20, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte announced he will be sending his foreign and defense ministers to Russia ahead of his own visit, at the personal invitation of President Vladimir Putin.

Sherlock

Trump administration will hopefully separate terrorists from moderates

trump assad
Donald Trump should surround himself with "realist" advisers, who understand the necessity of Russia-US cooperation in battling radical Islamists before any "political transition" attempts in Syria, one member of the secular opposition, Randa Kassis, told RT.

Donald Trump Jr. accepted the invitation from the founder of the Center of Political and Foreign Affairs (CPFA) Fabien Baussart during his father's electoral campaign. He attended the private high-profile dinner party in "a really narrow circle, some 30 people," according to Baussart's wife and one of the prominent figures in the Syrian secular opposition, Randa Kassis, who provided RT with exclusive commentary.

Document

Documents reveal stolen Russian weapons in Daesh militants' possession

A bandolier of spent bullets
© AP Photo/A bandolier of spent bullets
Sputnik Arabic has obtained documents, found in Iraq's city of Mosul, revealing the full names of Daesh militants, names of the units of terrorist organizations and their heads, as well as a full list of stolen Russian weapons in their possession.

The documents were found in one of Daesh's bunkers in the south-east of Iraq's second-largest city of Mosul.

Each of the four documents has a list of Daesh militants and the names of stolen Russian weapons they have in their possession. All the documents have the Daesh logo in the left-hand upper corner and Wilayat Ninawa (Mosul province preciously occupied by Daesh) inscription in the center.

фото документов, которые были обнаружены в одном из пунктов укрытия боевиков ДАИШ
© Sputnik Arabicфото документов, которые были обнаружены в одном из пунктов укрытия боевиков ДАИШ
One of the documents shows a list of Daesh militants, each of whom is in possession of a Kalashnikov assault rifle and five replaceable magazines.

Other documents specify registration numbers of Kalashnikov assault rifles, RPG-7 shoulder-launched anti-tank grenade launchers, bullpup straight-pull bolt-action rifles, VSSK Vykhlop magazine-fed sniper rifles and other weaponry.

Comment: See also: Secret document reveals Daesh fighters ordered not to attack US coalition planes


Bad Guys

Russian experts find new evidence of mustard gas attack in Aleppo - MoD

Russian military inspect suspected chemical weapons workshop in Aleppo, November 14, 2016
© / RuptlyRussian military inspect suspected chemical weapons workshop in Aleppo, November 14, 2016
Russian military experts have said reported finding new evidence of chemical warfare against Syrian civilians. The Defense Ministry said an unexploded mortar shell uncovered in Aleppo contained mustard gas.

Ammunition containing the chemical agent was reportedly used in a devastating attack on a village in the Aleppo province conducted back in September.

"An express-analysis of the contents [of ammunition] carried out using a portable infrared spectrometer revealed the presence of vesicant chemical warfare agent sulfur mustard. We've taken roughly a 20 milliliter sample from the shell. Afterwards it was sealed tight and delivered to the Russian Centre for reconciliation of opposing sides in the Syrian Arab Republic for further investigation," a representative for Russian Troops of Radiological, Chemical and Biological Defense (RChBD) told journalists.


The recovered chemical round is a crude homemade 240-mm mortar shell, with a capsule in the rear. The capsule contained from 0.5 to 1.5 liters of a black oily liquid, which proved to be a chemical warfare agent.


Over 40 people were injured in the attack they displayed typical symptoms of mustard gas poisoning.

Comment: See also: Russian MoD: Experts collecting evidence at site of anti-gov Aleppo chemical attack


Chess

Military Intelligence Warfare: The noose that Obama had wanted to hand to President Killary to hang U.S. democracy

We the People- The Constitution of the United States of America
We the People- The Constitution of the United States of America
Introduction

This will be a summary, update, and extension from, a 25,000-word masterpiece of historical writing: the obscure, little-noticed, but hair-raising and scrupulously documented, account of how U.S. foreign policy, starting in 1994 (shortly after Bill Clinton became President), began to be subcontracted-out or privatized to Silicon Valley and America's top weapons-firms such as Lockheed Martin: Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed's magisterial 22 January 2015 article, «How the CIA made Google: Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet».

His detailed account is 100% consistent with theorists who have alleged that ever since at least the George W. Bush Administration, the U.S. government has been moving more and more in the direction of becoming a police-state, but Ahmed's focus is earlier than that and on the international-affairs portion of that, and on the participation of Google and other Silicon Valley firms — and Wall Street (basically the entire aristocracy) — in making it all happen.

Ahmed, perhaps the greatest of all investigative journalists, had previously been the first person to publish a book (in 2002, The War on Freedom: How and Why America Was Attacked September 11, 2001) disproving and exhaustively replacing the 'historical' (which is largely mythological) narrative that the U.S. government and its aristocratic masters promulgate regarding 9/11. He there proved that networks of individuals inside the U.S. government participated along with some major U.S. corporations, in perpetrating the 9/11 attacks. He also crucially noted (page 42) that «The only countries that openly accepted the Taliban as Afghanistan's legitimate government were Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — all of which happen to be U.S/Western clients», but he probed in depth only into the U.S. side of the planning of the 9/11 attacks. He didn't deny the Saudi and other foreign involvement, but he documented high-level U.S. government-and-corporate assistance in the operation's success.

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
Much additional information came to light after 2002 filling in crucial details of the higher-level cooperation between the U.S. aristocracy and the aristocracies of mainly Saudi Arabia but also of those other Sunni-Islamic nations, to produce not only the 9/11 attacks but the entire jihadist movement, which is solely a Sunni-Islamic phenomenon (not at all Shiite, but specifically Sunni and headquartered in Saudi Arabia, which is the core of fundamentalist-Sunni belief). (Even Hillary Clinton said that it was the Sunni nations' aristocracies that were providing the «terrorist financing».)

Boat

After ridiculing Russian ship engine problems, Western media silent as NATO warship breaks down in pursuit

HMS Duncan
© News&StarHMS Duncan sailed from Portsmouth on Tuesday to monitor the Kuznetsov task group
After weeks of stories of the Admiral Kuznetsov's engine problems, it is the engines of one of Britain's top of the line Type 45 destroyers which have broken down, causing the ship to be towed back to port.

As Russia's fleet has deployed to the eastern Mediterranean the well-known engine problems of its aircraft carrier the Admiral Kuznetsov have received an inordinate amount of attention.

I have previously discussed the reasons for these problems. Briefly, the Admiral Kuznetsov when it was built in the 1980s was not only by an order of magnitude the biggest warship the Soviet/Russian navy had ever commissioned, but at 60,000 tons it was more than twice as heavy as the USSR's/Russia's next largest warships - the missile battlecruisers of the Kirov class - which use a combination of nuclear reactors and gas turbines.

The Russians had not previously had to develop engines - whether nuclear or conventional - for warship as large and heavy ship, and the arrangement they came up with involving a complicated arrangement of steam turbines and turbo-pressurised boilers is unreliable and comes under strain in heavy seas.

Comment: It seems like an irrelevant story, but this is just another example of how the Western media hypocritically slam and denounce anything Russian as either evil, dangerous or stupid. After all the hype about the black smoke coming from the Russian ship, they say nothing about this even more startling failure of a British ship.


Jet2

Russian MoD states the obvious: US never aimed to fight terrorism in Syria

us soldiers syria
© Khalil Ashawi / ReutersU.S. soldiers drive a military vehicle on the road connecting al-Rai town to Azaz city, northern Aleppo countryside, Syria October 4, 2016.
US officials have previously "dragged out" efforts to fight jihadists in Syria, but now they are attempting to "openly obstruct" Russia's anti-terrorist operation in the region, the Russian Defense Ministry said.

"Previously, the US side showed a counteraction to Russia fighting ISIS and Al-Nusra [Front] through dragging out any talks, failures to meet obligations to separate the opposition from terrorists and constant promises to some day provide information on the militants," the ministry's spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov said on Thursday.

Now the State Department "has openly called on other countries to obstruct our Air Force in fighting international terrorism in Syria," he added.

The defense ministry official referred to an earlier statement from US State Department spokesman Mark Toner, in which he encouraged other nations to not provide assistance to Russian oil-tankers delivering fuel for Russian jets in Syria.

Comment: The only thing the US regime change camp can 'only dream of' is the complete destruction of Syria through use of their mercenary army, just like Libya. It's not going so well for them anymore though. With the Trump presidency the situation could go either way, and is important to keep an eye on: