Puppet MastersS


Dominoes

Analyst Sees Iran Oil Ban Fatal Blow to EU

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© Unknown
The US-led EU oil sanctions against Iran strike a fatal blow to Europe, a senior analyst said, adding that Washington is sacrificing its European allies for the sake of its own foreign policy.

Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich, a Public Diplomacy Scholar, independent researcher and blogger with a focus on US foreign policy and the role of lobby groups, believes that the US-driven pressures and sanctions on Iran will have dire repercussions for the green continent, specially if Iran reciprocates the European move and blocks the Strait of Hormuz to tankers carrying crude to the EU.

"Although American-led Western allies are flexing their muscles by sending battle ships to the Persian Gulf, Washington's own war game exercise, The Millennium Challenge 2002 with a price tag of $250 million, underscored America's inability to defeat Iran. Oblivious to the lesson of its own making, by sending more warships to the Persian Gulf, the United States is inching towards a full scale conflict. The inherent danger from the naval buildup is that unlike the Cuban Missile Crisis, the forces in the Persian Gulf are not confined to two leaders who would be able to communicate to stop a run-away situation. Nor would the consequences of such a potential conflict be limited to the region," Sepahpour-Ulrich said in an article in Global Research.

Binoculars

UN envoy Annan says Syria efforts failing

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© AP/Shaam News NetworkThis image made from video provided by Shaam News Network Friday, July 6, 2012, purports to show shelling in Homs, Syria.
Special U.N. envoy Kofi Annan acknowledged in an interview published Saturday that the international community's efforts to find a political solution to the escalating violence in Syria have failed.

Annan also said that more attention needed to be paid to the role of longtime Syrian ally Iran, and that countries supporting military actors in the conflict were making the situation worse.

"The evidence shows that we have not succeeded," he told the French daily Le Monde.

Annan, the special envoy for the United Nations and the Arab League, is the architect of the most prominent international plan to end the crisis in Syria, which activists say has killed more than 14,000 people since March, 2011.

His six-point plan was to begin with a cease-fire in mid-April between government forces and rebels seeking to topple the regime of President Bashar Assad. But the truce never took hold, and now the almost 300 U.N. observers sent to monitor the cease-fire are confined to their hotels because of the escalating violence.

Comment: You can get a pretty good Idea from the above, just where things are heading. You can get an idea from the following links just how it's been orchestrated.

Syria's Bloody CIA Revolution - A Distraction?
CIA or Mossad Snipers Caught in Syria?
NATO's 'Civil War' Machine Rolls Into Syria
Syria Uprising Has CIA Written All Over It

Lastly a quote from this article: Lebanese army seizes weapons, explosives at Syrian border; which states "..weapons and explosives near the Syrian border, apparently destined for armed gangs.."

"Syria, which has been experiencing unrest since last year, has repeatedly said that weapons used by armed groups fighting against the government of President Bashar al-Assad are being smuggled into the country from Turkey and Lebanon."


Star of David

Israel Won't Cooperate With UN Probe of West Bank Settlements

Israel map
© n/a
Israeli officials today reiterated their "outrage" at the United Nations Human Rights Council for deciding to probe illegal settlement activity in the occupied West Bank, adding that they would never cooperate with any probes and would bar any members of the mission from entering the territory.

The UN appointed a panel of three experts to conduct a fact-finding mission on how settlements, illegal under international law, impact the Palestinian civilians living under Israeli occupation.

Israeli official statements blasted the panel as inherently flawed, insisting that any investigation of Israel would have to be "biased" and that the UN should focus its investigations exclusively on "non-democratic countries."

Israel had severed all ties with the human rights council months ago when the notion was initially raised. The probe is expected to focus only on the occupation's impact on Palestinians and not its legality, since there seems to be no real question that the occupation is illegal and that the construction of settlement in occupied territory is a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

USA

U.S. Gives Ally Afghanistan Special Security Status

Hillary Clinton, Hamid Karzai
© Reuters/Omar SobhaniU.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (L) and Afghan President Hamid Karzai hold a joint news conference in Kabul July 7, 2012.
Washington declared Afghanistan a major non-NATO ally on Saturday, a largely symbolic status reinforcing its message to Afghans that they will not be abandoned as the war winds down.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the decision, made by President Barack Obama, during her unannounced visit to Kabul where she met President Hamid Karzai on the eve of a major donors' conference in Tokyo which will draw pledges for aid.

The status upgrade may help Afghanistan acquire U.S. defense supplies and have greater access to U.S. training as the Afghan army takes more responsibility for the country's security ahead of the 2014 withdrawal of most NATO combat troops.

"Please know that the United States will be your friend and your partner. We are not even imagining abandoning Afghanistan. Quite the opposite," Clinton told a press briefing with Karzai before jetting off to Tokyo.

Obama's decision meets a pledge he made on a visit to Afghanistan this year to upgrade Kabul to a special security status given to only a limited number of U.S. partners -- including close allies like Israel and Japan -- which are not members of NATO.

Participants at the Tokyo meeting are expected to commit just under $4 billion annually in development aid for Afghanistan at Sunday's meeting, though the central bank has said the country needs at least $6 billion a year to foster economic growth over the next decade.

This is on top of the $4.1 billion committed annually by NATO and its partners for Afghanistan's security forces, pledged at a Chicago summit in May.

U.S. officials with Clinton declined to say how much aid the United States would pledge, which has significantly reduced aid since the peak year of 2010 when more than $6 billion was given, two thirds from Washington.

Dollar

Best of the Web: The Biggest Financial Scam In World History

Why Is the Libor Scandal So Important to You?

There have been numerous big banking scandals recently.

But the Libor scandal is the biggest financial scam in world history. See this and this.

The former CEO of Barclays said today that banks across the world were fixing interest rates in the run-up to the financial crisis .


Professor of economics and law Bill Black notes:
It is the largest rigging of prices in the history of the world by many orders of magnitude.

Crusader

A Biblical Threat to National Security

soldiers/Bible
© Associated Press
A military Bible paints war as religious devotion. What could go wrong?

Can a Bible be a "threat to national security"?

For years, the government has employed the risk of "national security" excuse to infringe on a wide range of freedoms - like the right to pass through an airport security checkpoint unmolested, or read library books without Big Brother peeking over your shoulder.

Michael L. "Mikey" Weinstein is trying to prove that there is more than one way to put the country at risk, and he's found it in a heretofore unlikely place: the Bible.

Well, the Holman Bible. To be more exact, a version of the Bible that, for reasons still undetermined, was authorized with the trademarked official insignia of the U.S. Armed Forces emblazoned on the front cover. There is The Soldier's Bible with the Army's seal, The Marine's Bible with the Marine Corps seal, The Sailor's Bible and The Airman's Bible, both with their respective insignia. The books have been sold for nearly six years throughout Christian bookstores, commissaries and PXs on U.S. military installations - and are still available on Christianbook.com, Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.

It's not the King James Version that the Gideons leave behind in hotel rooms drawers. The Holman Bible was commissioned and published by LifeWay Christian Resources, a subsidiary of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Baptist denomination in the world, in 2003.

In a 1999 press release announcing the edition's progress, Broadman & Holman Publishers called the new version "a fresh, precise translation of the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek of the Old and New Testaments." LifeWay President James T. Draper Jr. weighed in, saying there was a "serious need for a 21st-century Bible translation in American English that combines accuracy and readability," adding, "the Holman Christian Standard Bible is an accurate, literal rendering with a smoothness and readability that invites memorization, reading aloud and dedicated study."

Bad Guys

Best of the Web: Why no sanctions on the United States? A long and bloody record of 'crimes against peace'

President Obama presents former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright with a Presidential Medal of Freedom, May 29, 2012, despite her role in and public defense of the war crimes of the Clinton administration.
© UnknownPresident Obama presents former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright with a Presidential Medal of Freedom, May 29, 2012, despite her role in and public defense of the war crimes of the Clinton administration.
July 1 marked the start of a new round of sanctions designed to destroy the economy of Iran, create widespread suffering among the Iranian people, and thereby effect regime change in that country. The ostensible reason for the sanctions is that Iran has a nuclear program, which Washington and its allies allege is leading to the development of nuclear weapons. The Iranian government has denied any such intention, stating that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

Iran is far from the first country to suffer from a cutoff or sharp reduction in trade due to sanctions. Over the past several decades, the U.S. - sometimes through the United Nations Security Council, sometimes in coordination with its imperialist allies, sometimes on its own - has imposed sanctions, embargoes and blockades on dozens of countries. Some of the sanctions regimes have lasted for decades, in the case of Cuba a half-century.

The justifications for imposing sanctions have included alleged human rights violations, lack of democracy, military aggression in violation of international law, and engaging in terrorist acts. But a giant asterisk must be attached here, with a notation reading: "Not applicable to the United States, its imperialist allies, surrogates and puppets."

USA

Can The World Survive Washington's Hubris?

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© anunews.net
When President Reagan nominated me as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, he told me that we had to restore the US economy, to rescue it from stagflation, in order to bring the full weight of a powerful economy to bear on the Soviet leadership in order to convince them to negotiate the end of the cold war. Reagan said that there was no reason to live any longer under the threat of nuclear war.

The Reagan administration achieved both goals, only to see these accomplishments discarded by successor administrations. It was Reagan's own vice president and successor, George Herbert Walker Bush, who first violated the Reagan-Gorbachev understandings by incorporating former constituent parts of the Soviet Empire into NATO and taking Western military bases to the Russian frontier.

The process of surrounding Russia with military bases continued unabated through successor US administrations with various "color revolutions" financed by the US National Endowment for Democracy, regarded by many as a front for the CIA. Washington even attempted to install a Washington-controlled government in Ukraine and did succeed in this effort in former Soviet Georgia, the birthplace of Joseph Stalin. The President of Georgia, a country located between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, is a Washington puppet. Recently, he announced that former Soviet Georgia is on schedule to become a NATO member in 2014.

Those old enough to remember know that NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was an alliance between Western Europe and the US against the threat of the Red Army overrunning Western Europe. The North Atlantic is a long, long ways from the Black and Caspian Seas. What is the purpose of Georgia being a NATO member except to give Washington a military base on the Russian underbelly?

The evidence is simply overwhelming that Washington--both parties--have Russia and China targeted. Whether the purpose is to destroy both countries or merely to render them unable to oppose Washington's world hegemony is unclear at this time. Regardless of the purpose, nuclear war is the likely outcome.

Eye 1

Psychopathy and the CEO: Top executives have four times the incidence of psychopathy as the rest of us

psychopath
© unknown
Your child could grow up to be a psychopath and that may not be a bad thing.

He or she just might wind up a CEO.

The hallowed halls of business have more than a fair share of successful psychopaths, many of them CEOs and top executives, research shows.

A recent wave of interest in testing children for psychopathy is shining a light on the biology and psychology of psychopaths. University of Pennsylvania criminologist and psychopathy expert Adrian Raine believes medical tests might help determine whether a child will be a psychopath when he or she grows up.

Hourglass

Inquiry into Army's Killing of Civilians on Bloody Sunday to be Launched by Northern Ireland Police

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© APPallbearers carry one of 13 coffins of Bloody Sunday victims after the requiem mass at St Mary's church at Creggan Hill in 1972
Up to 30 officers will investigate 1972 massacre, in what the brother of a victim called a step in the right direction

Northern Ireland's chief constable, Matt Baggott, has confirmed that his officers would be conducting a murder inquiry into the army's killing of 13 civilians on Bloody Sunday 40 years ago.

Up to 30 officers are expected to join the inquiry team, although the head of the Police Service of Northern Ireland was unable to say when the inquiry would begin.

Some of the families of the Bloody Sunday dead have called for members of the Parachute Regiment involved in the 1972 massacre - one of the biggest atrocities of the Troubles - to be arrested and face prosecutions over the shootings.