Puppet MastersS


Smiley

Ukraine's attempt to join the 'New Silk Road' ends in abject failure


Sputnik
Fri, 22 Apr 2016 11:56 UTC
Ukraine train new silk road railroad
© AP Photo/ Sergei Poliakov
Ukraine's experimental new transit route, which had been designed to bypass Russia via the so-called New Silk Road project, has proven a failure. Ukrainian Railways has announced that the train has returned home empty.

In mid-January, Ukraine launched a cargo train from its southwestern Black Sea port of Illichivsk to China via the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, making its way from the Black Sea to Georgia, and then on to Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, thus joining the Chinese-led Silk Road initiative.

Earlier this month, it was reported that the pilot project was stuck at the Kazakh-Chinese border due to a lack of prospective clients ready to fill it with cargo. The train had originally been scheduled to return to Ukraine at the end of March at the latest.

Comment: This is what Ukrainian leaders and their Western technocratic mentors offer to their people - a long series of ridiculous, 'anti-Russian' pipe dreams. And it only gets worse.

Further reading:

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Megaphone

Chief Syrian diplomat: Terrorists coming to Syria with the consent and support of European intelligence agencies


RT
Wed, 20 Apr 2016 01:36 UTC
syrian streets
© Ahmed Jadallah / Reuters
Jihadists are coming to Syria with the consent and support of the intelligence services of European states, Syria's ambassador to the UN and chief negotiator at the Geneva peace talks, Dr. Bashar Ja'afari, told Euronews.

Europe facilitates the passage of terrorists with EU citizenship to Syria and Iraq, the Syrian diplomat insists, stressing that"governments are responsible for every terrorist who comes from Europe."

"Today we have a new phenomenon called European terrorism. They claimed before that there was Arab and Islamic terrorism. Today we are victims of European terrorism, emanating from Brussels, Paris, London, Spain, Germany, Italy..."Ja'afari told Euronews.

"It's hard to believe that a terrorist who leaves Paris, London, Brussels, or Boston, or Australia and arrives in Syria without a visa, without a passport, through dozens of states and the Turkish-Syrian or Jordanian-Syrian border, has done so without intelligence services overseeing these operations," Ja'afari said.
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Dollars

Hypocrisy: Hillary denounces Panama's 'outrageous tax havens', yet many named in documents are Clinton donors


RT
Thu, 21 Apr 2016 22:04 UTC
Hillary Clinton
© Yuri Gripas / Reuters Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
Names in the Panama Papers link Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, fresh off a big win in New York, and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, to those who use offshore tax shelters.

Though the former secretary of state was quick to denounce the Panama Papers revelations, describing them as "outrageous tax havens and loopholes that super-rich people across the world are exploiting,"some of those found in the 11.5 million documents have connections with the Clintons dating back four decades.

A new report by McClatchy, one of more than 100 journalism outlets with access to the leaked documents, reveals a number of Clinton donors and associates used Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, "global provider for legal and trust services," for their offshore accounting.
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Document

28 Pages: The mysterious "Document 17" that implicates Saudis

Brian P. McGlinchey
28Pages.org
Mon, 18 Apr 2016 21:04 UTC
bush saudis
9/11 Commission Work Plan Reveals FBI Found al Qaeda Member's U.S. Pilot Certificate Inside Envelope of Saudi Embassy in D.C. Investigators Sought to Examine Possible Political Influence on Examination of Saudi Government, Royal Family Links

As President Obama prepares to visit Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, his administration is under increasing pressure to declassify 28 pages that, according to many who've read them, illustrate financial links between the Saudi government and the 9/11 hijackers.

Meanwhile, a far lesser-known document from the files of the 9/11 Commission—written by the same principal authors as the 28 pages and declassified last summer without publicity and without media analysis—indicates investigators proposed exploring to what extent "political, economic and other considerations" affected U.S. government investigations of links between Saudi Arabia and 9/11.

Comment: The ironic thing is that practically all of these Saudi individuals may be total patsies. If they were involved to the degree they are thought to have been, it's still possible that they had no idea that they would eventually be implicated in the 9/11 attacks. In other words, even if they were engaging in criminal and spy-related activities (on behalf of the Safari Club, perhaps?), they may have been set up. The CIA and Mossad like to have a fall guy. For more, see Joaquin Flores's recent interview with Ryan Dawson, and this SOTT Focus: 60 Minutes, 28 pages and the limited hangout: The truth about the Saudi connection to 9/11

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War Whore

Best of the Web: Addicted to war: Since 1776, US has been at war 93% of the time - That's 222 out of 239 years!


WashingtonsBlog
Fri, 20 Feb 2015 00:00 UTC
army guys
© www.cnbc.com
The U.S. has only been at peace for 21 years total since its birth

In 2011, Danios wrote:
Below, I have reproduced a year-by-year timeline of America's wars, which reveals something quite interesting: since the United States was founded in 1776, she has been at war during 214 out of her 235 calendar years of existence. In other words, there were only 21 calendar years in which the U.S. did not wage any wars.

To put this in perspective:

* Pick any year since 1776 and there is about a 91% chance that America was involved in some war during that calendar year.

* No U.S. president truly qualifies as a peacetime president. Instead, all U.S. presidents can technically be considered "war presidents."

* The U.S. has never gone a decade without war.

* The only time the U.S. went five years without war (1935-40) was during the isolationist period of the Great Depression.
For a year-by-year timeline of America's major wars (1776-2011) go here.

Comment: Rather staggering, don't you think? Also, for many of the war years, the US had multiple opponents. After all this war practice, we might rightly expect a simple bombing raid on ISIS to produce results. But, win or lose, the American Military Industrial Complex just keeps cranking out war profits in a permanently war-driven economy, for a permanently imperialistic and mechanically self-serving society.

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Yoda

Is Putin preparing a top-to-bottom governmental shake-up?

The Saker
Unz Review
Thu, 21 Apr 2016 17:10 UTC
Putin 2016 call in show
As he does once a year, last week President Putin spent over three and a half hours answering 80 questions out of the 3+ million questions which were received. The show, which was aired live on Channel One, Rossiya-1 and Rossiya-24 TV channels, and the Mayak, Vesti FM and Radio Rossii, was an unprecedented success which was watched and commented upon by millions of Russians. You can read the full transcript of the show by clicking here, and the transcript of a conversation between Putin and the journalist corps following the show here.

The main Russian TV channel, Rossia-1, also aired not one, but two special talk-shows (see here and here) solely dedicated to a discussion of Putin's performance. These talk-shows are the famous "Evening with Vladimir Soloviev" - by far the highest visibility talk-show on Russian TV. Just for the record, Rossia-1 is the crown-jewel of the powerful and state-controlled All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK) media holding. Between the call-in show with Putin (3 hours and 40 minutes), the first talk show (2 hours and 12 minutes) and the second talk show (1 hour 44 minutes) the Russian public was exposed to a stunning seven and a half hours of discussion. Some will call it "propaganda", which can be viewed as negative or as positive, but which changes little. The main issue here is that this was a major, huge, public-communications effort. So what was the overall message which was conveyed by all this? Let me summarize it for you:
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Info

Putin: 'Russia needs to build insurmountable barrier against smuggling, illegal migrants'


Sputnik
Thu, 21 Apr 2016 17:18 UTC
Vladimir Putin
© Sputnik/ Aleksey Nikolskyi
There is a need for an "insurmountable barrier" to smuggling and undocumented migration to be put on Russian borders, President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday.

The Russian president said that over 3,300 undocumented migrants were detained in Russia last year, and over 2,800 criminal cases were initiated over illegal border crossings.

"The border service of Russia's FSB [Federal Security Service] is doing quite a bit of work [in this area] <...> It is necessary to increase the analytic capacity and technical equipment of the border system and put an insurmountable barrier in the way of smuggling, undocumented migration and transnational crime," Putin said at a meeting with military officers.
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Attention

Netanyahu calls out 'red lines' of Israel's security at meeting with Putin


ITAR-TASS
Thu, 21 Apr 2016 16:46 UTC
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Russian President Vladimir Putin
© EPA/ALEXANDER NEMENOV/POOL
Israel considers the absence of a new terrorist front in the Golan Heights and the fact that Hezbollah has no modern weapons to be "the red lines" of its security, the country's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday during a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin.

"Firstly, we are doing everything that depends on us to prevent the emergence of ultra-modern weapons in the hands of Hezbollah, which get there from Syria and Iraq," he said. "Secondly, we are doing everything to prevent the appearance of an additional terror front against us in the Golan Heights," Netanyahu said.

"This is the red line we have identified," he added.
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Chess

Assad must go? The record shows Erdogan as the real despot

Martin Berger
New Eastern Outlook
Thu, 21 Apr 2016 16:18 UTC
Erdogan Assad
In times past: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Bashar al-Assad
The last round of Geneva talks regarding Syria ended in a stalemate due to the immovable position held by the Syrian opposition. The opposition, sponsored and controlled by Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United States and a number of Western players, is convinced that the elected president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, should go no matter what, while none of his supporters should be allowed to participate in any future transitional government. These demands have been voiced in Geneva by the head of the High Negotiations Council, Assad al Zubi.

However, even the most impartial observer following the conflict in Syria over recent years must be surprised with such an aggressive posture, held by Washington and its collaborators against the government in Damascus, in a bid to reorder the Middle East so that total domination of the region by the US would be ensured.

Indeed, the key issue of the Syrian negotiations is the future of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, with Washington finding it unacceptable that Syria be governed by both a sovereign ruler and one with close ties to Russia and Iran. However, every attempt to remove the Syrian leader from power in direct violation of both the Syrian constitution and the norms of international law have so far failed.

Comment: European leaders, especially Germany's Merkel, have had many opportunities to stand up to Washington, and have yet to do so. They are bought-and-paid-for vassals of the Empire of Chaos.

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Eye 2

Unnamed source claims cash-strapped ISIS selling own fighters' organs


RT
Thu, 21 Apr 2016 14:36 UTC
Islamic State militant
© Stringer
Islamic State has resorted to selling organs from injured fighters on the black market to raise much-needed funds due to the terror group's desperate financial straits, according to the Arabic-language Al-Sabah newspaper.

The publication, as cited by the FARS news agency, quoted an unnamed source from the Iraqi city of Mosul, who said that "doctors were threatened to take out the body organs of a wounded ISIL militant."

Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) is suffering from a shortage of funds due to a loss of territory in Mosul, the third-largest city in Iraq. It wants to harvest the organs from its own terrorists to sell hearts and kidneys on the black market.
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