The Russian air task force's coordinated efforts have helped achieve drastic changes in Syria, President Vladimir Putin said at a meeting with commanders and heads of the defense sector on Tuesday.

"Long-range bombers performed 178 sorties and the strikes from the air and the sea against the infrastructural facilities of the IS and Jabhat al-Nusra terrorist organizations were accurate, powerful and effective," the president said. "Precisely these factors helped achieve drastic changes in the struggle against militants," Putin said.

According to the president, since the beginning of the air operation in Syria Russian planes have flown more than 10,000 sorties and hit 30,000 targets. "Since the start of the operation directed at facilities of international terrorists on the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic, Russian Aerospace Defense Forces made over 10,000 sorties, delivered many airstrikes at the territory, hit over 30,000 targets, over 200 facilities on extracting and processing oil," the president noted.

The Russian president said that 115 cruise air-and sea-based missiles were fired from surface ships, submarines, as well as from strategic aviation and strategic missile carriers.

According to a tranche of 240 pages of confidential negotiating documents on the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) leaked to Greenpeace Netherlands, the Obama administration has been pressuring the European Union to allow the importation of hormone-tainted meat and genetically-modified food products in return for easing US import tariffs on European automobiles. Critics of the TTIP claim that it is nothing more than the companion Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) on steroids, as far as granting multinational corporations unlimited powers to override national and supranational laws. These include those of individual EU member states and the European Union itself.

EU member states are increasingly growing critical of the ramifications of the TTIP for the 508 million European citizens that greedy, corrupt, and relatively regulation-free US corporations are eyeing as potential consumers. In an interview with the French newspaper Sud Ouest, French Trade Minister Matthias Fekl, a critic of the TTIP, said after the disclosure of the TTIP papers, «Europe is offering a lot and we are getting very little in return. This is unacceptable». Fekl added, «It is a deal that - in the state it is in today - would be a bad deal». Fekl and other European officials are concerned that Europe's health and environmental regulations will be the first casualties if American corporations are permitted to run roughshod over existing European environmental, food safety, and public health protections.

WhoWhatWhy has discovered that the FBI secretly flagged at least one of the "Boston Marathon bombers" as a terrorist threat in his immigration records, despite publicly denying it had done so.

This designation existed right up to the time the bombs went off at Boylston St. on April 15, 2013.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev's heavily redacted immigration records, known as an A-file (alien file), were released in February under the Freedom of Information Act and posted online by US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). FOIA has a "frequently requested record" provision where multiple request for the same record triggers a "reading room" (posted online) treatment of the records. WhoWhatWhy was one of those requesters.

For context, it's important to note that soon after the bombing, uncomfortable questions were raised by WhoWhatWhy when it became clear the FBI had long been aware of Tsarnaev. Even some of the mainstream outlets, which almost uniformly have accepted the government's version of events, couldn't ignore this reality.

The Bureau steadfastly maintains that it determined the elder Tsarnaev (who died in an altercation with police three days after the bombing) was not any kind of a national security threat. It also denies ever having asked him to be an informant.

International Military Review - Syria & Iraq, May 11

"All Americans should be outraged at the idea that when we're killing large numbers of people in Muslim countries around the world without knowing who they are, that we somehow are not going to pay a price later?"

GOSZTOLA: What is the "assassination complex"? When we talk about the "assassination complex," are we talking about a much larger system that includes, for example, the explosion of watchlisting, where people are intimidated and harassed? Typically, they are predominantly Arab Americans, and they have this experience when they try to fly on airplanes. Should we see that as a byproduct of this "assassination complex"?

SCAHILL: What's interesting [...] is the statement by a whistleblower, who provided us with a copy of the 180-plus page of watchlisting guidance, which is really the government's rule book for watchlisting. And it basically maps out a system where individuals have their data and metadata, their names, the people they are in contact with poured into several government databases, one of which has more than 1 million people and growing by the day. Everyone who goes into that system is preemptively categorized as a known or suspected terrorist. [...]

[Y]ou can end up on a watchlist because your phone number was discovered in the phone of someone else they were monitoring or someone else, who's phone was in the phone of someone else they were monitoring. And no matter why you are in that database, you are designated as a "known or suspected terrorist," a KST. Now, that information can trickle all the way to foreign governments and to state and local law enforcement in the U.S. So, if someone gets pulled over by a police officer and they run a check on someone, who happens to be a known or suspected terrorist because their name is similar to someone else's or because their phone number was in the phone of someone that the U.S. government was monitoring, then they are in the situation where a local sheriff or a sheriff's deputy is seeing someone is a known or suspected terrorist, which sounds like an extremely frightening thing.

Once you're in that database, you are assigned what's called a TPN number, and it's basically like a "terrorist tracking number." Every single person who has ever been killed in a drone strike intentionally, meaning the intended targets, has been assigned a TPN number. One of the things that has not gotten a lot of attention that we reported on is that 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, of course the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a drone strike—This 16-year-old U.S. citizen kid was killed two weeks after his father while he was sitting, having a meal with his cousins, and one of the things that our source was able to provide us with was the fact that Abdulrahman al-Awlaki had a terror watchlisting number assigned to him.

Now, was it because they believed he was a terrorist or was it because his father was top on a U.S. hit list? We don't know the answer to that question, but every single person, every bit of innocuous information that gets put into that database results in you being labeled a known or suspected terrorist. Basically, what it is is that is the very first step of a process that can eventually lead to your death by a drone strike. But the vast majority in there are not people that are on the kill list.They are people who posted something on Facebook or Twitter, know people, have made phone calls abroad, or their data ends up in someone else's phone. So, the direct answer to your question is, yes, this explosion of watchlisting is directly related to the assassination program across the globe.

The European Commission will reportedly start sanctions procedures against Spain and Portugal for the first time, Euractiv says. The site has learned that the countries are being accused of not making "sufficient effort" to cut their deficits.


On Tuesday, the European Commissioners held a debate on what to do with the most troubled states under current EU fiscal rules. The rules had been introduced ahead of the euro launch in 1999 and punitive measures for their violation have been unprecedented.

EU rules say the fine could be up to 0.2 percent of GDP - €2.16 billion (US$2.97 billion) for Spain and €359 million ($410 million) for Portugal. However, Reuters reported in April the sanctions could be symbolic and the fine could be set at zero.

According to Euractiv, such recommendations will be published on May 18.

How the United States presumes to possess the authority to determine the fate of a sovereign nation thousands of miles from its own shores in the Middle East is never explained by US Secretary of State John Kerry when he recently announced a new ultimatum leveled at Damascus. Nor is it explained why Syria should capitulate to US demands to begin a political transition that has demonstrably left other nations across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) divided, destroyed, and safe-havens for state-sponsored terrorism years after "successful" US-backed regime change has been achieved - Libya most notably.

Yet despite all of this, according to the Associate Press (AP) in their article, "Kerry warns Assad to start transition by Aug. 1 or else," the United States fully expects Damascus to concede to a "political transition" engineered by Washington, leaving the nation in the hands of verified terrorists linked directly to the political and militant forces currently laying waste to Libya and those nations that put them into power.

The article reports:

Secretary of State John Kerry warned Syria's government and its backers in Moscow and Tehran on Tuesday that they face an August deadline for starting a political transition to move President Bashar Assad out, or they risk the consequences of a new U.S. approach toward ending the 5-year-old civil war.

After interviewing Hillary Clinton's top aides last week, the question now becomes whether or not the FBI will interview Clinton next as the investigation enters its final stages.

In an interview today with CBS' Face The Nation, Hillary said nobody had contacted her regarding an interview.

"No one has reached out to me yet, but last summer, I think last August, I made it clear I'm more than ready to talk to anybody, anytime."

Clinton also doubled down on her claims that she did nothing wrong.

"It's a security inquiry, I always took classified material seriously. There was never any material marked classified that was sent or received by me."

Of course, there's classified and then there's "classified", but we'll save that for another day.

As far as whether or not the FBI will eventually interview Clinton, although the FBI hasn't said Hillary is the target of the probe, many experts are saying that's how they see the situation unfolding.

Every day, in meetings at all levels of government, representatives of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), planning groups, and federal agents surround elected representatives and insist that their policies have nothing to do with international agendas. They regularly publish reports and rail against anyone even mentioning the names Agenda 21 or the new Agenda 2030. "No, no, no," they insist. "Those people are just crazy conspiracy theorists. Ours is just a local plan for our community."

Elected representatives are often confused. Issues and policies suddenly appear in front of them with sample, ready-made legislation. And then the unending pressure begins for them to pass it. There is confusion, uncertainty and there is the herd mentality to pass legislation. And it's passed without knowledge of its origins, its purpose, and especially a lack of understanding of its consequences. "Just do it," goes the mantra.

France is in the midst of its worst political crisis in decades with the country's beleaguered Socialist government to face a no-confidence vote on Thursday after it bypassed parliament to ram through controversial labor reforms.

The announcement that the labor bill would be pushed through the lower house without a vote triggered widespread protests against the government, with police firing tear gas and rubber pellets at demonstrators, who have since called for further protests.

Protesters described the move as "an insult to the people of this country" and the labor bill as an "unprecedented setback for workers' rights in France, a return to the 19th century."