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Putin on Ukrainian Orthodox schism: Forcing flock into foreign church is a risky political ploy


RT
Wed, 16 Jan 2019 16:24 UTC
Poroshenko
© Reuters / Valentyn Ogirenko
Petro Poroshenko points at a decree signed by Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople granting partial independence to a Kiev-backed “Orthodox Church of Ukraine”
Kiev is risking a major crisis with its ploy to legitimize schismatic Orthodox Christian churches with the help from Constantinople, Russian President Vladimir Putin said. Telling people where to pray is a bad idea.

Last month, Ukraine's two unrecognized Orthodox churches backed by the government of President Petro Poroshenko formed a new religious organization. In January, Patriarch Bartholomew I of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople formally recognized it as a canonical entity and part of his patriarchate and granted it partial independence. Poroshenko is relying on this development to boost his approval ratings ahead of the presidential election in March, which he is likely to lose, according to polls.

Speaking to Serbian media on Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin dismissed the entire affair as a purely political ploy that has nothing to do with faith and religion.

"The new church structure is a secular political project. Its main goal is to separate the peoples of Russia and Ukraine, fuel religious division in addition to national ones. It's no coincidence that Kiev declared it as an 'ultimate independence from Moscow,'" he said.
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Megaphone

Don't meddle in Venezuela, Moscow tells coup-cheering Washington


RT
Wed, 16 Jan 2019 16:21 UTC
maduro protester
© REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins
Russia has criticized the US government for bullying Venezuela and encouraging its opposition to stage a coup against President Nicolas Maduro, who was sworn in for his second term last week.

"Nations should avoid meddling in other nations' internal affairs," Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday. He said that Washington's encouragement of opposition forces in Venezuela "has made them unwilling to seek reconciliation [with the president], which is regretful."

Venezuela is currently in a political crisis, with the opposition-controlled National Assembly declaring President Maduro a "usurper" and its speaker, Juan Guaido, an "interim president" of the country. The move came after strong public support from Washington, which has been advocating toppling Maduro for quite some time.
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Quenelle

How Trump bucked Israeli pressure to keep US in Syria

Gareth Porter
The American Conservative
Mon, 14 Jan 2019 16:10 UTC
Benjamin Netanyahu
© EPA-EFE/RONEN ZVULUN / POOL
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
The Pentagon was not the only party pressing Donald Trump to keep troops in Syria last year. It turns out the Israeli government and its supporters in Washington were working very hard to get the Trump administration to use America's military presence there to support an Israeli campaign of airstrikes aimed at threatening war with Iran.

The Israeli strategy was aimed at dividing Russia from Iran and thus putting pressure on Tehran to withdraw its military personnel from Syria. A campaign by a pro-Israel think tank actually succeeded in getting such a policy ready for Trump's approval last fall - although it was not supported by some Pentagon officials.

The story of the Israel lobby's latest attempt to capture American policy, recounted here for the first time, reveals just how far Israel was able to reach into the Trump administration before the president personally intervened.

Israel's Strategy of Provocation in Syria

In early 2018, Israel had stepped up the pace of its airstrikes against Iran-related targets in Syria. The original rationale for the strikes had been to prevent Iran from transporting advanced, highly accurate missiles through Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon (although Israeli military intelligence had admitted nearly a decade ago that Hezbollah had already received hundreds of such weapons). But by 2018, the IDF had added another reason for the attacks: to force Iran to give up its military presence in Syria altogether. This despite the fact that Israel had failed to cite any evidence of any permanent Iranian bases there.
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MIB

Lavrov: American arrested in Moscow for spying caught 'red-handed'


RT
Wed, 16 Jan 2019 16:14 UTC
Paul Whelan
© Paul Whelan Facebook
Moscow didn't nab American citizen Paul Whelan with plans to swap him for Russian nationals being held overseas, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.

Whelan, who is an American, Canadian, British, and Irish national, was apprehended and detained in Moscow because he "was receiving certain materials he wasn't supposed to receive," Lavrov said at a press event on Wednesday.


Comment: One other fact to keep in mind: Paul Whelan was discharged from the Marines because he tried to steal more than $10,000 in cash while deployed in Iraq. So now this man, who the US military discharged due to criminal behavior, has 4 different passports and is visiting countries over the world for business. Is it any wonder the Russians are suspicious of his reasons for being in the country?


The minister addressed the suggestions that the prospect of a prisoner exchange was the key motive behind Whelan's arrest. Such notions are "completely untrue," he stressed.
"We never do things like that. I'll say it again: he was caught red-handed."
Whelan, 48, was detained in late December, last year, while visiting Russia to attend a friend's wedding. He is an Iraq War veteran and director of global security and investigations for BorgWarner, a Michigan-based car parts manufacturer.

Comment: Previously:

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Stock Up

What sanctions? Russian economy expected to overtake Germany's by 2020


RT
Wed, 16 Jan 2019 16:07 UTC
Red Square
© Reuters / Tatyana Makeyeva
Despite years of Western sanctions, Russia will become the world's fifth-largest economy as early as next year, surpassing Germany and the UK, multinational bank Standard Chartered said in its long-term growth forecasts.

In a report outlining projections about the world economy up until 2030, the bank said that China is likely to unseat the US to become the world's biggest economy at some point in the next year, when measured by a combination of purchasing-power-parity (PPP) exchange rates and nominal gross domestic product. It will be joined by the US, India, Japan, and Russia in the top five.

The top 10 countries will also include Germany, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey, and the UK.

"By 2020, a majority of the world population will be classified as middle class. Asia will lead the increase in middle-class populations even as middle classes stagnate in the West," said Standard Chartered researcher Madhur Jha.
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Bullseye

Tucker Carlson: Our leaders are mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule

Ian Schwartz
Real Clear Politics
Fri, 04 Jan 2019 00:00 UTC
Tucker Carlson
© AP Photo/Richard Drew, File
Tucker Carlson delivered a monologue on how the American citizen is being exploited on the Wednesday edition of his FOX News show:
TUCKER CARLSON, HOST: Happy New Year. Newly-elected Utah senator Mitt Romney kicked off 2019 with an op-ed in the Washington Post savaging Donald Trump's character and leadership. Romney's attack and Trump's response this morning on Twitter are the latest salvos in a longstanding personal feud between the two men. It's even possible that Romney is planning to challenge Trump for the Republican nomination in 2020. We'll see. But for now, Romney's piece is fascinating on its own terms. It's a window into how the people in charge, in both parties, see our country.

Romney's main complaint is that Donald Trump is a mercurial and divisive leader. That's true of course. Beneath the personal slights, though, Romney has a policy critique. He seems genuinely angry that Trump might pull American troops out of the Syrian civil war. Romney doesn't explain how staying in Syria would benefit America. He doesn't appear to consider that a relevant question. More policing in the Middle East is always better. We know that. Virtually everyone in Washington agrees.

Comment: Psychopaths rule our world

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USA

Federal judge orders removal of citizenship question from 2020 census

Hansi Lo Wang
NPR
Tue, 15 Jan 2019 20:09 UTC
Wilbur Ross
© Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross listens to President Trump at the White House in March. Ross' decision to add a question about U.S. citizenship status to the 2020 census sparked six lawsuits from dozens of states, cities and other groups that want the question removed.
A federal judge in New York has ruled against the Trump administration's decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman ordered the administration to stop its plans to include the controversial question on forms for the upcoming national head count "without curing the legal defects" the judge identified in his 277-page opinion released on Tuesday.

The question asks, "Is this person a citizen of the United States?" All U.S. households have not been asked such a question on the census since 1950, although it has been asked of a sample of households for past head counts and for the Census Bureau's American Community Survey.

Furman found that the decision by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to add the citizenship question to the 2020 census was "unlawful" because of "a veritable smorgasbord of classic, clear-cut" violations of the Administrative Procedure Act, including cherry-picking evidence to support his choice. Ross oversees the Census Bureau.
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NPC

'Huge teams' engaged in 'fixing' google search results

Allum Bokhari
Breitbart
Wed, 16 Jan 2019 14:40 UTC
google beatdown
© Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty
Google has "huge teams" working on manual interventions in search results, an apparent contradiction of sworn testimony made to Congress by CEO Sundar Pichai, according to an internal post leaked to Breitbart News.

"There are subjects that are prone to hyperbolic content, misleading information, and offensive content," said Daniel Aaronson, a member of Google's Trust & Safety team.

"Now, these words are highly subjective and no one denies that. But we can all agree generally, lines exist in many cultures about what is clearly okay vs. what is not okay."

"In extreme cases where we need to act quickly on something that is so obviously not okay, the reactive/manual approach is sometimes necessary."

The comments came to light in a leaked internal discussion thread, started by a Google employee who noticed that the company had recently changed search results for "abortion" on its YouTube video platform, a change which caused pro-life videos to largely disappear from the top ten results.

Comment: Additional reporting from Breitbart:
[...]

At least one post in the discussion thread revealed the existence of a file called "youtube_controversial_query_blacklist," which contains a list of YouTube search terms that Google manually curates. In addition to the terms "abortion," "abortions," "Maxine Waters," and search terms related to the Irish abortion referendum, a Google software engineer noted that the blacklist includes search terms related to terrorist attacks. (the posts specifically mentions that the "Strasbourg terrorist attack" as being on the list).

"If you look at the other entries recently added to the youtube_controversial_query_blacklist(e.g., entries related to the Strasbourg terrorist attack), the addition of abortion seems...out-of-place," wrote the software engineer, according to the source.

After learning of the existence of the blacklist, Breitbart News obtained a partial screenshot of the full blacklist file from a source within Google. It reveals that the blacklist includes search terms related to both mass shootings and the progressive anti-second amendment activist David Hogg.

This suggests Google has followed the lead of Democrat politicians, who have repeatedly pushed tech companies to censor content related to the Parkland school shooting and the Parkland anti-gun activists. It's part of a popular new line of thought in the political-media establishment, which views the public as too stupid to question conspiracy theories for themselves.

Here is the partial blacklist leaked to Breitbart:
2117 plane crash Russian

2118 plane crash

2119 an-148

2120 florida shooting conspiracy

2121 florida shooting crisis actors

2122 florida conspiracy

2123 florida false flag shooting

2124 florida false flag

2125 fake florida school shooting

2126 david hogg hoax

2127 david hogg fake

2128 david hogg crisis actor

2129 david hogg forgets lines

2130 david hogg forgets his lines

2131 david hogg cant remember his lines

2132 david hogg actor

2133 david hogg cant remember

2134 david hogg conspiracy

2135 david hogg exposed

2136 david hogg lines

2137 david hogg rehearsing

2120 florida shooting conspiracy
The full internal filepath of the blacklist, according to another source, is:

//depot/google3/googledata/superroot/youtube/youtube_controversial_query_blacklist

[...]

The fact that Google manually curates politically contentious search results fits in with a wider pattern of political activity on the part of the tech giant.

In 2018, Breitbart News exclusively published a leaked video from the company that showed senior management in dismay at Trump's election victory, and pledging to use the company's power to make his populist movement a "hiccup" in history.

Breitbart also leaked "The Good Censor," an internal research document from Google that admits the tech giant is engaged in the censorship of its own products, partly in response to political events.

Another leak revealed that employees within the company, including Google's current director of Trust and Safety, tried to kick Breitbart News off Google's market-dominating online ad platforms.

Yet another showed Google engaged in targeted turnout operations aimed to boost voter participation in pro-Democrat demographics in "key states" ahead of the 2016 election. The effort was dubbed a "silent donation" by a top Google employee.

Evidence for Google's partisan activities is now overwhelming. President Trump has previously warned Google, as well as other Silicon Valley giants, not to engage in censorship or partisan activities. Google continues to defy him.
See also:

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Propaganda

Fake News networks trashed Trump with 90% negative spin in 2018 - but did it matter?

Rich Noyes
Newsbusters
Wed, 16 Jan 2019 12:31 UTC
trump fake news
At the midpoint of Donald Trump's first term, the establishment media's obvious hostility shows no signs of relenting, but polls show this negative coverage has had no discernible impact on the public's attitudes toward the President.

Since January 20, 2017, the Media Research Center has analyzed every moment of coverage of President Trump on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts, seen by approximately 23 million people each night. Highlights:
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Pistol

Bolsonaro loosens draconian 'gun control' laws amidst wave of violence in Brazil


TeleSUR
Wed, 16 Jan 2019 12:31 UTC
militares brasileros y Bolsonaro
© AFP
In 2017, Brazil had a record of 64,000 murders, more than any other country, with 43,000 of those homicides the result of firearms.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro Tuesday signed a decree temporarily making it easier for Brazilians to buy guns, the first step toward a campaign promise to overturn regulations that have essentially prohibited civilians from bearing arms.

Bolsonaro won the presidency by running on a neoliberal, far-right, and law-and-order platform. His message resonated with voters in Brazil, which in 2017 had a record 64,000 murders, more than any other country, with 43,000 of those homicides the result of firearms.

Comment: Also see: Bolsonaro vows to 'fight the marxist trash' in 2019

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