US policy think-tank Brookings Institution confirms that contrary to propaganda, US-Saudi "moderates" and Turkey-Qatar "Islamists" have been coordinating all along.

The war in Syria continues to drag on, with a recent and renewed vigor demonstrated behind an opposition long portrayed as fractured and reflecting a myriad of competing foreign interests. Chief among these competing interests, the public has been told, were the US and Saudis on one side, backing so-called "moderate rebels," and Turkey and Qatar on the other openly backing Al Qaeda and its various franchises including the Islamic State (ISIS).

However, for those following the conflict closely, it was clear from the beginning and by the West's own admissions that success hinged on covertly providing arms, cash, equipment, and both political and military support to Al Qaeda and other sectarian extremists, not opposed by Saudi Arabia, but rather by using Saudi Arabia as the primary medium through which Western material support could be laundered.

And this fact is now confirmed in a recent article published on the Brookings Institution's website titled, "Why Assad is losing."

It states unequivocally that (emphasis added):

The involvement of FSA groups, in fact, reveals how the factions' backers have changed their tune regarding coordination with Islamists. Several commanders involved in leading recent Idlib operations confirmed to this author that the U.S.-led operations room in southern Turkey, which coordinates the provision of lethal and non-lethal support to vetted opposition groups, was instrumental in facilitating their involvement in the operation from early April onwards. That operations room — along with another in Jordan, which covers Syria's south — also appears to have dramatically increased its level of assistance and provision of intelligence to vetted groups in recent weeks.

Whereas these multinational operations rooms have previously demanded that recipients of military assistance cease direct coordination with groups like Jabhat al-Nusra, recent dynamics in Idlib appear to have demonstrated something different. Not only were weapons shipments increased to the so-called "vetted groups," but the operations room specifically encouraged a closer cooperation with Islamists commanding frontline operations.

The massive terrorist attack in Kumanovo is the latest provocation in the quest to create a Greater Albania and simultaneously sabotage Russia's Balkan Stream project.

The Republic of Macedonia was rocked by a large-scale terrorist attack on Saturday when over 40 armed individuals fought with police for control of the city of Kumanovo close to the country's capital.

The attackers were from the so-called "Kosovo Liberation Army" (KLA), a former terrorist group that was thought to have been disbanded after NATO occupied the Serbian province, and Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski said that some of them had received their militant training in the Mideast.

The combined carnage wounded 37 police officers and killed 8 of them, while ultimately eliminating 14 terrorists and leading to the capture of 30 others.

The banksters, who nearly tanked the global market in their collective effort to loot the peoples of the world, are operating out of "larger than ever" big banks.

They are not only "too big to fail," but too big to contain. The derivatives have not been stopped or controlled; leveraging ratios are still out of control; and bank runs could happen at anytime, subjecting big banks to desperate calls on cash they would be unable to fulfill; apparently everything they have is loaned out and sometimes demanded back "each and every day."

The entire thing is a dangerous high wire act that looms over our otherwise ordinary lives with great peril.

The Corporate Reform Coalition (CRC) did a study titled Still Too Big to Fail (PDF) that underscores the dangers of the current funny money schemes and the fact that even the weak-kneed requirements of the Dodd-Frank "Wall Street Reform Act" have not been fulfilled.

The Ukrainian president's decision to reclaim Donetsk Airport, a key strategic point in the conflict in the country's east, are in violation of the Minsk peace deal, says the Kremlin.

Petro Poroshenko vowed on Monday to take the airport back: "I have no doubt - we will free the airport, because it is our land. And we will rebuild the airport." He also promised to erect a monument to the "cyborgs," which has become a common nickname for the Ukrainian soldiers that fought against the forces of the self-proclaimed eastern republics for control of Donetsk Airport.

Poroshenko spoke at the premier of the documentary Airport, which was dedicated to the siege.

When asked if he thinks such words violate the Minsk peace deal, the Russian president's press secretary said they do: "Of course, they are a violation. In fact, we have repeatedly said that Ukraine is not complying with the Minsk agreement."

The "industry of death" exists in the world as many people in power live off war, Pope Francis told Italian schoolkids in the Vatican on Monday.

"Many powerful people don't want peace because they live off war," the Pontiff said as he met with pupils from Rome's primary schools in the Nervi Audience Hall.

Talking to children during the audience organized by the Peace Factory Foundation, he explained that every war has the arms industry behind it.

"This is serious. Some powerful people make their living with the production of arms and sell them to one country for them to use against another country," the Pope was cited by AGI news agency as saying.

The head of the Catholic Church labeled the arms trade "the industry of death, the greed that harms us all, the desire to have more money."

"The economic system orbits around money and not men, women," he told 7,000 kids present at the audience.

Despite the fact that wars "lose lives, health, education," they are being waged to defend money and make even more profit, the Pope said.

"The devil enters through greed and this is why they don't want peace," 78-year-old Francis said.

"There can be no peace without justice," the Pope said and asked the children to repeat those words out loud three times.

Around 20 vessels representing nine NATO member states have begun the Baltic Fortress 2015 exercises, taking place off the Lithuanian Baltic Sea coast.

Warships from Belgium, Estonia, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and the UK are participating in the exercises, accompanied by a Lithuanian Navy submarine unit and two airplanes from the country's Air Force.

The maneuvers in the Lithuanian territorial waters are scheduled to last until May 14, Lithuania's Ministry of National Defense said.

The ships will practice interactions between NATO allies during international operations, including cooperation with bloc's rapid reaction forces, Standing NATO Mine Countermeasures Group 1.

The Baltic Fortress 2015 program will see the vessels performing joint maneuvering, shooting, de-mining, interception and the escorting of vessels as well as search and rescue operations, the ministry added.

Baltic Fortress drills have been held annually since 2008 with the host country rotating every year. Neighboring Latvia will provide the venue for the exercise next year.

NATO's ground forces are also currently involved in two exercises in the Baltic States.

Up to 3,000 Lithuanian troops are taking part in the Zaibo Kirtis (Lightning Strike) drills, aimed at perfecting joint action by the army and civilian authorities against so-called hybrid threats combining both military and non-military methods of fighting.

Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has uncovered one of the biggest lies in modern American history. It turns out that much of what the American public was told about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden was a blatant lie. According to Hersh, Osama bin Laden had been captured by Pakistan all the way back in 2006, and he was being held by the ISI as a prisoner at the Abbottabad compound that the Seals ultimately raided in 2011. In addition, Hersh says that the ISI and Pakistan's military knew about the Seal raid in advance. Arrangements were made so that the Black Hawk helicopters could travel through Pakistani airspace safely, and the ISI guards at Osama bin Laden's compound were pulled away before the Seals got there. And by that time, Osama bin Laden was reportedly in such bad health that he was essentially a cripple. There was no "firefight" at all - only a turkey shoot. Afterwards, Osama bin Laden's body never made it to the USS Carl Vinson for a "burial at sea". That was all just part of the cover story according to Hersh. Of course the White House and Obama's lackeys at CNN are strongly denying all of this, and they will continue to deny the truth for as long as they possibly can. But there are individuals in the U.S. military and in the U.S. intelligence community that can come forward and tell us what really happened. Let us hope that at least some of those individuals still care enough about this country to do that.

According to Hersh, one of the biggest lies that Obama told was that Pakistani leadership had no idea that the Seals were coming in. Actually, the truth is that the head of the army, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and the director general of the ISI, General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, were both heavily involved in the planning of the operation. The following is an excerpt from Hersh's article for the London Review of Books...

Pasha and Kayani were responsible for ensuring that Pakistan's army and air defence command would not track or engage with the US helicopters used on the mission. The American cell at Tarbela Ghazi was charged with co-ordinating communications between the ISI, the senior US officers at their command post in Afghanistan, and the two Black Hawk helicopters; the goal was to ensure that no stray Pakistani fighter plane on border patrol spotted the intruders and took action to stop them. The initial plan said that news of the raid shouldn't be announced straightaway.

All units in the Joint Special Operations Command operate under stringent secrecy and the JSOC leadership believed, as did Kayani and Pasha, that the killing of bin Laden would not be made public for as long as seven days, maybe longer. Then a carefully constructed cover story would be issued: Obama would announce that DNA analysis confirmed that bin Laden had been killed in a drone raid in the Hindu Kush, on Afghanistan's side of the border. The Americans who planned the mission assured Kayani and Pasha that their co-operation would never be made public. It was understood by all that if the Pakistani role became known, there would be violent protests - bin Laden was considered a hero by many Pakistanis - and Pasha and Kayani and their families would be in danger, and the Pakistani army publicly disgraced.

When the Seals got to the compound in Abbottabad, bin Laden and his family were completely unguarded. That is because the ISI guards had already been pulled back.

Paul Craig Roberts, Keynote Address to the Annual Conference of the Financial West Group, New Orleans, May 7, 2015

The defining events of our time are the collapse of the Soviet Union, 9/11, jobs offshoring, and financial deregulation. In these events we find the basis of our foreign policy problems and our economic problems.

The United States has always had a good opinion of itself, but with the Soviet collapse self-satisfaction reached new heights. We became the exceptional people, the indispensable people, the country chosen by history to exercise hegemony over the world. This neoconservative doctrine releases the US government from constraints of international law and allows Washington to use coercion against sovereign states in order to remake the world in its own image.

To protect Washington's unique Uni-power status that resulted from the Soviet collapse, Paul Wolfowitz in 1992 penned what is known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine. This doctrine is the basis for Washington's foreign policy. The doctrine states:

It seems that some post-communist countries of Eastern and Central Europe are drifting into Russia's orbit, a one US expert pointed out, desperately trying to find out what "has gone wrong" in that part of the world.

Once Washington's steadfast allies, some European countries are now "at risk" of drifting into the Kremlin's fold, Dalibor Rohac, a Research Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC, emphasized.

"At the time, these [Eastern and Central European] countries were counted amongst the most staunchly pro-American members of NATO—and also among the boldest economic reformers on the continent, cutting their taxes and privatizing social security systems. Today, the situation could not be more different," the analyst stressed.


Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, Prime Minister of Slovakia Robert Fico, President of the Czech Republic Milos Zeman and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary have been recently boosting their ties with Moscow, Dalibor Rohac noted deprecatingly.

Western "colonial" states are not interested in S. Africa's development, but rather want to take its natural resources and never give anything back, Jacob Zuma, S. African president, told RT. It's China's investment that Zuma sees as a way to prosperity.

"The Western world or the European countries, in particular, came to Africa [in the 19th century] to colonize and they had been taking the resources of Africa," Zuma said.

But even after the continent decolonized itself in the mid-20th century, its relationship with the US, UK, France and other Western countries "remained the same," he stressed.