The US president has sided with Turkey and warned the Syrian Kurdish militia not to seize more territory in Syria to avoid upsetting Ankara or the so-called "moderate" opposition. Obama voiced support for Erdogan against the Kurdistan Workers' Party. In a long phone conversation that lasted an hour and twenty minutes, Obama told his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan that the US has an "unwavering commitment" to Turkey's national security.

Obama said he is "concerned" about the Syrian Army's and Kurdish fighters' gains in northern Syria as he "urgently called for a halt to actions that heighten tensions with Turkey and with moderate opposition forces in northern Syria," according to a statement from the White House. The US president stressed that the ongoing advance of Syrian armed forces and Kurdish militia, with support from the Russian Air Force, could "undermine our collective efforts in northern Syria to degrade and defeat ISIL."

While advising Erdogan to show "reciprocal restraint" and avoid shelling northern Syria where Ankara is engaging Kurds, Obama stressed that "YPG forces should not seek to exploit circumstances in this area to seize additional territory."

The Libyan interim government has condemned the US airstrike on a suspected Islamic State training camp in Sabratha in which two abducted Serbian embassy staff were killed, calling the unsanctioned bombardment a grave violation of its sovereignty.

Libya's interim government issued a statement saying that it "strongly condemns the airstrikes carried out by the US Air Force at certain positions in the town of Sabratha on Friday morning, February 19, 2016, without any coordination or consultation with the interim Libyan government."


"Any interference, similar to the one that has taken place, will be considered an open and flagrant violation of the sovereignty of the Libyan state and international law," the statement said.

The interim government said that it values the foreign assistance it receives in the war on terror, but added that "any military or political interference into Libyan affairs should be performed in a legal way through parliament and the newly formed government."

Boobus Americanus seems to utterly have lost the ability to think for themselves. So when the totally controlled US media mumbles on about how Al Assad needs replacing, no American could dream of asking, "Why? What did he do to us?" The answer, of course, is nothing. He didn't attack us, doesn't threaten us and is the democratically elected leader of Syria. You don't have to like him.

I am an equal opportunity anarchist. I despise all governments equally. That said, I don't support military overthrow of legal, sovereign nations by anyone. Syria is a sovereign nation led by a legal ruler. That's a lot more than can be said of several of the players in our new World Series of War or Super Bowl of Conflict or simply World War III.

After World War II, a Military Tribunal was held in Nuremberg Germany that determined the waging of aggressive war, "essentially an evil thing... to initiate a war of aggression... is not only an international crime: it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

As I write, Turkish forces have been shelling Syria for almost a week. They have ground forces on the border and have shifted small units into Syria. In the south of Iraq and Syria, Saudi Arabia has mobilized the largest military maneuvers in the nation's history. Estimated participation in "Operation North Thunder" indicates between 150,000 and 350,000 troops from 20 countries are participating. As a result, both Saudi Arabia and Turkey seem poised to invade Syria in a war of aggression in order to overthrow Al Assad.

Since we seem on the verge of World War III, just what is the point spread between the teams? I have to dumb down this piece so Americans can faintly understand it and putting it in terms of a point spread makes it easier. Between Fox News and fluoride in the water, Americans seem to have lost the ability to think for themselves.

Syria is obviously the most important team; after all it's a home game. For now.

The military conflict in Syria goes back to early 2011. The western press calls it a civil war but it is hardly a civil war. The legal and democratically elected government of Syria has been attacked on a variety of fronts by terrorists sponsored directly and financed by Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Israel, the US, the UK and France have all contributed money and arms to what is generally considered ISIS. So the totally controlled press in the west talks about "fighting" ISIS when in fact they both created ISIS, and they continue to finance ISIS.

Given the overwhelming support of foreign nations to ISIS and other terrorist groups, the army of Syria had lost considerable ground until Russia stepped up to the plate in 2015.

The handing of Ewald von Kleist's prize to the former French foreign minister Laurent Fabius became what the press described as "the pivotal moment" of the security conference in Munich. A good half of the world's leading politicians stood at attention as the wars in Syria and Ukraine (the two countries where Mr. Fabius was most actively involved during his stay in the ministry) continued, with people dying.

In fact, the recent resignation of Mr. Fabius was accompanied by so many perks and honors, that it is high time to ask: do the European creators of the numerous Western-made "paradises" in Ukraine, Libya, Syria and the Balkans really deserve all of their numerous "golden parachutes"? In France, Fabius will be heading the Constitutional Council - the body now charged with providing a normative base for tightening the screws after last year's terrorist acts in Paris. The counterterrorist measures are expected to include all sorts of restrictions, including stripping the unwanted people of their French citizenship - a measure which only Brezhnev's Soviet Union was capable of doing previously, with the people like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Mstislav Rostropovich.

As Italy continues its criminal investigation against the son of Turkey's President, the chances of it finding money laundering pathways may depend on politics and mafia connections.

Italy's investigation into criminal activities by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan may have to look to authorities in Switzerand, Malaysia and Austria to solve the case, Turkish parliamentarian from the opposition People's Democratic Party (HDP) Aykut Erdogdu told Sputnik Turkiye.

Unlike previous scandals and investigations in Turkey, which were swept under the carpet, this investigation may actually result in some results, according to Erdogdu. A participant in previous investigations, Erdogdu believes that charges against Recep Tayyip Erdogan's son, Bilal, could be legitimate, if the investigation is made international.

Broadcasting from deep in the heart of the American Empire, join your hosts Harrison Koehli and Elan Martin, and fellow SOTT editors, as they discuss everything from current events and the latest machinations and manipulations of the global elite to history, science, and religion, and how it all fits together.

This week on the Truth Perspective, talked about aims. What does it mean to have an aim? Do you have one? What goes into the task of formulating an aim? Sometimes we think we have an aim, but we don't. Sometimes our aims are vague or simply the product of everyday habits and social norms. But a clear, overarching aim in life can be something different.

The Truth Perspective is brought to you by the SOTT Radio Network and SOTT.net, your one-stop source for independent, unbiased, alternative news and commentary on world events.

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A US digital rights group is celebrating a "big victory" as a California judge has authorized it to conduct a discovery against the NSA and collect factual evidence of the agency's "warrantless" surveillance.

"We had been barred from doing so since the case was filed in 2008," the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said in a press release.

It has been eight years since the group filed its Jewel v. NSA suit, targeting the NSA on behalf of a former AT&T customer, Carolyn Jewel. According to the EFF and five plaintiffs it represents, AT&T has collected and routed copies of internet traffic to a secret room in San Francisco controlled by the NSA.

The EFF's complaint, aimed at "NSA in cooperation with AT&T", predated the public's awareness of Edward Snowden, the former intelligence contractor, who exposed the agency's surveillance operations in 2013.

In 2006, a former AT&T technician Mark Klein claimed he helped to create the secure room where customer data was being collected by government agents.

Even though Jewel was eventually unable to prove that she was the victim, the EFF continues to fight for five other plaintiffs, "ordinary Americans who are current or former subscribers to AT&T's telephone and/or internet services."

Started as a case against AT&T, defendants in the lawsuit include the most powerful politicians in the US, such as former Vice President Dick Cheney, former President George W. Bush, and former NSA director Michael Hayden, among others.

Having gone through numerous court rejections, which have been challenging the EFF's efforts to end the mass surveillance, the group is marking "a big step" as Judge Jeffrey White of California District Court has pushed the case forward.

Russian President Vladimir Putin predicted the US ambitions to rule the world, experts said. Putin clearly identified a documented US drive to dominate the world in his 2007 Munich speech, but nations around the world continue to resist it, American and European scholars told Sputnik.

"President Putin is obviously aware of the fundamental tenets of neo-conservative US foreign policy since 2001," California State University Emeritus Professor of Political Science Beau Grosscup, an author and terrorism analyst, told Sputnik. That plan was spelled out clearly in the 1992 Pentagon Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) authored by Paul Wolfowitz and future Vice President Dick Cheney to maintain the United States as the sole architect of the post-Cold War landscape, Grosscup noted. "[The plan] includes by-passing existing international institutions, the United Nations in particular, for unilateral reliance on military power, backed by ad hoc alliances," Grosscup pointed out.

The plan also included a Full Spectrum Doctrine that said the United States should be able to fight and win numerous wars, including nuclear ones, for regime change purposes in rogue nations, and that it should prevent the rise of competing powers such as Russia, China and Europe, Grosscup added.

NATO is deploying tanks and military equipment to a series of caves in Norway. They have been largely redundant since the end of the Cold War, but now the alliance is stocking up on hardware, which will be deployed near NATO's border with Russia.

It may seem like something from a James Bond movie, but NATO has been operating a slick operation in hillside caves built in the Norwegian countryside for decades. However, now the US-led alliance feels it is time to beef up its military presence, to prepare for what it perceives as a Russian threat.

The U.S. believes that airstrikes in Iraq and Syria have destroyed more than $500 million in cash that ISIS used to pay its fighters and fund its terror and military operations.

That is probably a low estimate, as one U.S. official told ABC News that the figure is in "the high hundreds of millions of dollars."

As part of the effort to weaken ISIS, the U.S. military has struck at ISIS's finances, particularly its lucrative oil smuggling enterprise in Syria that provides revenue for its operations.