© Anatolii Stepanov/AFP/Getty ImagesUkrainian troops patrol near Donetsk where they are fighting to hold positions on the edge of the city.
R
ussia has began major military exercises involving more than 100 aircraft near the border with
Ukraine.
The war games on Monday came as the
conflict intensified around Donetsk, a city of a million people held by the pro-Russian rebels who have been fighting Kiev government forces since April. Heavy artillery fire continued there on Sunday night, according to the city administration. Ukraine's national security council said on Monday that government troops had begun "liberating Donetsk from the north after encircling the city".
The headquarters of Kiev's "anti-terrorist operation" said rebels had intensified artillery fire at its positions overnight. Both sides have reportedly fired low-accuracy artillery such as Grad rockets in populated areas during the conflict, in which at least 500 civilians have been killed.
A map published by the national security council showed government forces had made significant gains, cutting the rebels in Donetsk off from those in Lugansk. Ukrainian troops had taken back three-quarters of the territory formerly controlled by the rebels, the council said.
UK manufacturing continues to decline. Small businesses are not seeing an improvement in the economy. The jobs numbers are falling but spending is declining, Walmart is concerned that the economy is not recovering. Obama asking for 3.8 billion for the illegal immigrant problem that the administration caused. US kidnaps Russian MP, might be used to trade with Edward Snowden. Ukraine waging full out war on the Ukrainian people and the central bankers/US government approve of this action. ISIS threatening all embassies around the world. Back in May the US state department sent explosives to embassies across the world. The US has a plan for civil unrest in the United States.
Be prepared for a false flag event.
© ITAR-TASS / Alexei Nikolsky
President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday signed a decree on countermeasures to Western sanctions.
The document entitled "On the Application of Certain Special Economic Measures to Ensure the Security of the Russian Federation"
prohibits or restricts, for one year, the import of certain kinds of agricultural products, raw materials and food originating in a country that has imposed economic sanctions against Russian companies and (or) individuals or has joined such sanctions.A list of goods the import of which may be restricted in response to the Western sanctions is being prepared and will be approved by the Russian government, its spokeswoman Natalya Timakova said on Wednesday.
"The document is being prepared for signing," she told ITAR-TASS.
Five-year accord will see Russia help Iran organise oil sales, but government denies it has violated international obligations
© Agence France-PresseA picture released by the Iranian President's website shows Iran's first offshore oil platform in the Caspian Sea
Vladimir Putin has agreed a $20bn (£11.8bn) trade deal with Iran that will see Russia sidestep Western sanctions on its energy sector.
Under the terms of a five-year accord, Russia will help Iran organise oil sales as well as "cooperate in the oil-gas industry, construction of power plants, grids, supply of machinery, consumer goods and agriculture products", according to a statement by the Energy Ministry in Moscow.
The Russian government issued a new statement on Wednesday after mysteriously withdrawing a similar release on Tuesday.
Comment: Of course it is a matter of "serious concern" for Washington! It means that their economic hegemony is seeing its last days, and it's about time!
© Respectparty.org
George Galloway has announced that he will establish his own public enquiry into the BBC's role in reporting the events of the past few weeks in Gaza.
The Bradford West MP had previously announced that he is refusing to pay his licence fee until the BBC demonstrated a more impartial standard of broadcasting on the conflict. Galloway has been openly critical of the its editorial standpoint on the conflict, arguing that the BBC has a duty, as a publicly funded organisation, to adopt an unbiased approach to such major stories.
Many in the country were outraged when the BBC failed to report on the July 19th national demonstration which had been attended by tens of thousands of demonstrators. It belatedly addressed this with a hastily-arranged piece on its website, for which it had to borrow an image from a rival broadcaster. It has also been commented that since the outcry, the BBC's reporting had apparently become more balanced. This was in part down to the reporting of Middle East correspondent Jeremy Bowen from the front-line in Gaza. Strangely - indeed, inexplicably - Bowen is absent from the reporting this week as he is, according to Twitter, 'on holiday'.
RTTue, 05 Aug 2014 19:13 UTC
© downtrend.comA new mystery leaker...Secret Government Watchlist Rules
CNN reported on Tuesday.
Earlier that day,
The Intercept published a
new article based off of disclosures provided to them by an unnamed source pertaining to the US government's use of watchlists to monitor known and suspected terrorists.
Previously,
The Intercept has worked closely with top-secret National Security Agency documents admittedly provided to journalists by Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the NSA.
Tuesday's leak, however, is of a document dated August 2013 - weeks after Snowden chose to identify himself as the source of the NSA leak and had already arrived in Moscow where he later received asylum and remains today."An August 2013 slide from the National Counterterrorism Center called 'TIDE By The Numbers' lays out the scope of the Obama administration's watchlisting system, and those it is targeting," Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux wrote for
The Intercept. "The documents, obtained from a source in the intelligence community, also reveal that the Obama administration has presided over
an unprecedented expansion of the terrorist screening system."
© firstlook.orgScreenshot from The Intercept
Tuesday's
Intercept article came one day after the agency reported on previously unpublished NSA documents, but also barely two weeks after Scahill and Devereaux wrote of another NCC document provided to them by
a source within the intelligence community.In the 14 months since Snowden's documents first began to surface online, the US intelligence community has time and time again condemned the leaking of classified information, charging the ex-contractor with espionage and reportedly going to great lengths to prevent another major breach on par with the NSA disclosures, or the release of documents a few years earlier by WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning. In less than three weeks' time, however,
The Intercept has managed to obtain government documents without authorization from most presumably another source.
Comment: The "terrorist" definition de jour? Whew...how to keep up? How did we ever survive before we had the NSA, DHS, NCC, ODNI, ONSI, FPS, DIA, NGA, NRO, AFISRA, MI, MCIA, ONI, OICI, I&A, CGI, FBI, DEA, INR, TFI and the CIA taking such good care of us? Thanks, but no thanks, Mr. President. Only knowledge, truth, and un-compromised information keep us safer.
© Thelibertymill.com
Russia has been quiet, too quiet, since the EU and US unleashed their latest set of sanctions. However, as military drills and troop build-ups occur on Ukraine's borders,
Reuters reports that Russian Prime Minister Medvedev is considering a significant retaliation, "any unfriendly measures by the EU, including those in the area of air transportation, we'll be studied and won't remain without a response."
Russian business daily
Vedomosti quoted unnamed sources as saying the foreign and transport ministries were discussing possible action which might force EU airlines into long and costly detours and put them at a disadvantage to Asian rivals by restricting or banning European airlines from flying over Siberia on busy Asian routes. Costs? Over $1.3bn for every months for Lufthansa, BA, and Air France...
As Reuters reports,
The Russian business daily Vedomosti quoted unnamed sources as saying the foreign and transport ministries were discussing possible action which might force EU airlines into long and costly detours and put them at a disadvantage to Asian rivals.
Russia may restrict or ban European airlines from flying over Siberia on busy Asian routes, a newspaper reported on Tuesday, following Western sanctions which have grounded one Russian carrier and a billionaire's private jet.
Unlike previous centuries and epochs, modern warfare is not restricted solely to the battlefield. Rather, it extends into the information sphere where the dissemination of propaganda and the construction of narratives are of equal importance to weapons and soldiers. For today, the legitimacy of a war in the eyes of public opinion in many ways determines victory or defeat. It is here, in the realm of public opinion, that an organization such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) becomes indispensible to the Empire, not so much for the facts that it presents, but the narrative that it shapes.
Put another way, HRW serves as intermediary between the facts on the ground and the western public who rely on the organization (and similar NGOs such as Amnesty International) to accurately tell the story of a given conflict. It is precisely this position as an "information middleman" that makes HRW both relevant and dangerous for the simple fact that the manner in which it presents information, along with the critical facts it chooses to omit or otherwise distort, can have a tremendous impact on how the world views a conflict and, consequently, how the world responds.
By examining the way in which HRW documented, investigated, and presented findings from the conflicts in Israel/Palestine, Ukraine, Libya, Syria, and Venezuela, it becomes clear that the organization, though theoretically objective and "disinterested," is in fact an integral part of the western imperial system. Though HRW has done some good work, and likely will in the future, this cannot be taken as evidence that the organization is somehow not a part of the Empire. On the contrary,
without HRW and similar organizations, Washington and its allies would not be able to champion themselves as "defenders of human rights," "beacons of democracy," and "humanitarian powers."
Maria Tsvetkova
ReutersFri, 01 Aug 2014 09:15 UTC
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin accused the United States Monday of living beyond its means "like a parasite" on the global economy and said dollar dominance was a threat to the financial markets.
"
They are living beyond their means and shifting a part of the weight of their problems to the world economy," Putin told the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi while touring its lakeside summer camp some five hours drive north of Moscow.
"
They are living like parasites off the global economy and their monopoly of the dollar," Putin said at the open-air meeting with admiring young Russians in what looked like early campaigning before parliamentary and presidential polls.
Comment: Actually Putin's approval ratings
had reached 85.9 % last May and they keep rising.
Probably because he tells things as they are.
© www.popularresistance.orgCollaborators and Frenemies
The NSA "maintains a far-reaching technical and analytic relationship with the
Israeli SIGINT National Unit (ISNU) sharing information on access, intercept, targeting, language, analysis and reporting," according to an NSA document dated April 13, 2013, which is among other documents revealed by
The Intercept on Monday.
The documents show the US has provided Israel with cash, raw data and analysis under agreements reached between the NSA and Israeli SIGINT National Unit also known as Unit 8200, the secretive signals intelligence organization.
The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald wrote that the documents "underscore the indispensable, direct involvement of the US government and its key allies in Israeli aggression against its neighbors. That covert support is squarely at odds with the posture of helpless detachment typically adopted by Obama officials and their supporters."
The documents also show Unit 8200 along with the US, Britain and Canada attempt to collect signals from throughout the Middle East.
In 2003 and 2004, the US explored a "massively expanded intelligence-sharing relationship called 'Gladiator.'" But the Israelis demanded hundreds of millions of dollars in exchange for the project, which "appears never to have been consummated," one document shows.
Comment: Do we think for one minute the United States is exempt from Israeli spying and espionage activities? Think again! A CIA-led National Intelligence Estimate on cyberthreats in 2013 ranked Israel the third most aggressive intelligence service against the U.S., behind only China and Russia (likely a low estimate!). And, the U.S. routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first filtering out information about U.S. citizens (as per Snowden). All phone calls and emails are included in this data mine. And, the agreement between the U.S. and Israel places no legally binding limits on the use of this data by the Israelis, nor does it have any legal obligations to international law. Constitutional rights of Americans to privacy?Who owns the NSA? Just another couple of lousy illusions.
Comment: The Western nations were warned that Putin would institute countermeasures in reaction to economic sanctions, so it will be interesting to see how far this goes when Western profits start to really suffer.
Man of conscience: Putin wants countermeasures to Western sanctions that support domestic manufacturers without hurting consumers
Russian sanctions? You Must be Joking! Russia Holds All the Cards!
Russian sanctions and eastern turmoil already taking economic toll on Western businesses
Boomerang effect! Putin: US sanctions contradict its national interests, will backfire
Is it worth it? Sanctions against Russia affect quarter of German exporters