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Russian President Vladimir Putin is a tough but thin-skinned leader who is squandering his country's potential, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Wednesday, a day after she likened his actions on the Crimean peninsula of Ukraine to those of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.
Clinton, a potential 2016 presidential contender, warned during her speech at the University of California, Los Angeles, that "all parties should avoid steps that could be misinterpreted or lead to miscalculation at this delicate time."
Putin has said he was protecting ethnic Russians by moving troops into Crimea.
Clinton said Tuesday at a closed fundraising luncheon in Long Beach that Putin's actions are similar what happened in the Nazi era in Czechoslovakia and Romania.
© AFP/Getty
Channel 4, a public service television station based in the United Kingdom, has announced that it will show footage from that Tuesday morning captured from the International Space Station by Frank Culbertson, the only American on board the ISS. When Culbertson was notified that something had occurred in New York, he realized they would be passing over the city soon.
Comment: This last part is interesting, as it seems to be the main goal of such events, and their subsequent media coverage, to induce and disperse collective trauma among the population.
Limbic Warfare and Martha Stout's "Paranoia Switch"
© Alexey Nikolsky, AFP/Getty ImagesRussian President Vladimir Putin gestures.
The "Body Leads" project backed by the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), the think tank reporting to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, uses the principles of movement pattern analysis to predict how leaders will act.
U.S. policymakers are seeking any advantage they can find as they try to anticipate Putin, who in the past week has ordered Russian troops into neighboring Ukraine and laid claim to the Crimea Peninsula. The ensuing crisis has led to U.S. and European sanctions against Russia, spurred weapons and aircraft shipments to Eastern European nations and revived tensions last seen during the height of the Cold War.
Comment: Clearly it's been so long since these fools in the Pentagon have had to face a real adversary that they are scratching their heads, looking for any advantage they can get!
Oh no, it's the new axis of evil dictators!
In a message to the Russian leader, President Assad "expressed..., on behalf of the Syrian people, Syria's solidarity with Putin's efforts to restore security and stability to Ukraine in the face of attempted coups against legitimacy and democracy in favor of radical terrorists," Syria's official news agency SANA reported.
Abby Martin
Glenn Greenwald points out the independence that RT, a Russian media organization, permits Abby Martin who denounced Russia's alleged invasion of Ukraine, compared to the fates of Phil Donahue (MSNBC) and Peter Arnett (NBC), both of whom were fired for expressing opposition to the Bush regime's illegal attack on Iraq. The fact that Donahue had NBC's highest rated program did not give him journalistic independence. Anyone who speaks the truth in the American print or TV media or on NPR is immediately fired.
Russia's RT seems actually to believe and observe the values that Americans profess but do not honor.
I agree with Greenwald. You can read his article here. Greenwald is entirely admirable. He has intelligence, integrity, and courage. He is one of the brave to whom my just published book, How America Was Lost, is dedicated. As for RT's Abby Martin, I admire her and have been a guest on her program a number of times.
My criticism of Greenwald and Martin has nothing to do with their integrity or their character. I doubt the claims that Abby Martin grandstanded on "Russia's invasion of Ukraine" in order to boost her chances of moving into the more lucrative "mainstream media." My point is quite different. Even Abby Martin and Greenwald, both of whom bring us much light, cannot fully escape Western propaganda.
© UnknownJohn Baird looks so mad, he might just eat a kitten.
A government source confirmed that the soldiers were informed Thursday afternoon that they had 24 hours to leave Canada.
Six of the soldiers were in Saint-Jean, Que., where they were leaning English and French. Another two soldiers were participating in a training program at CFB Gagetown, and the ninth soldier was teaching Canadian soldiers Russian in Gatineau, Que.
© AFP Photo/Juan BarretoA riot policeman shoots tear gas CIA Funded Protesters
"We received a note from the foreign ministry of Venezuela that was delivered to our embassy in which it declared four diplomats working in our embassy as 'persona non grata,'" Panama's Deputy Foreign Minister Mayra Arosemena told reporters.
Comment: That's Diplospeak for: "Hit the road, Jack".
The diplomats are Ambassador Pedro Pereira, charge d'affaires Jaime Serrano and two other embassy officials.
Comment: Well well, butta wouldn't melt in my mouth! Who do these jokers think they are fooling? This is the tactic of a child. You know the ones that do something bad, and then play innocent?
© Wang ZhaoUkrainian President Viktor Yanukovych shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping during a signing ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in December 2013.
To this point, the Chinese government has engaged in a diplomatic balancing act, refusing to condemn either the pro-Western coup or Russia's response. At a press conference in Beijing on Sunday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Qin Gang stressed "China's long-standing position not to interfere in others' internal affairs" and voiced support for Ukraine's "independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity" - without indicating who China believed had violated it. At a press conference the next day, Gang refused to voice support for Russia's actions, but equally refused to state whether China recognised the legitimacy of the coup-installed government in Kiev or to condemn the Russian incursion into Crimea.
In Russia, the Putin government and loyal media outlets portrayed China's stance as supportive. The Russian foreign ministry declared on Monday that Moscow and Beijing had "broadly coinciding views... in connection to the situation in Ukraine and around it." In the United States, by contrast, the Wall Street Journal highlighted the "noncommittal remarks" coming from the Chinese government.
Fascist paramilitaries in the protests that brought down Ukraine's government
The New York Times, for example, asserted, "Putin's claim of an immediate threat to Ukrainian Russians is empty," while Britain's Guardian dismissed as a "fancy" claims that events in Crimea were an attempt to "prevent attacks by bands of revolutionary fascists," adding that "the world's media has [not] yet seen or heard from" such forces.
This is an obscene cover-up.
The reality is that, for the first time since 1945, an avowedly anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi party controls key levers of state power in a European capital, courtesy of US and European imperialism. The unelected Ukrainian government, headed by US appointee Arseniy Yatsenyuk, includes no fewer than six ministers from the fascist Svoboda party.
Less than a year ago, the World Jewish Congress called for Svoboda to be banned. But the party's founder and leader,
Oleh Tyahnybok, who has spoken repeatedly of his determination to crush the "Russkie-Yid mafia that controls Ukraine," was feted by US and European Union officials as they prepared last month's coup.
© Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesA Russian soldier and a Navy man guarded the entrance to the Ukrainian Navy's headquarters at the sea port of Sevastopol, in the Crimea region of Ukraine.
"The chief thing, your honor, is not to think," Tolstoy's amputee remarked. "If you don't think, it is nothing much. It mostly all comes from thinking."
It is advice, however, that virtually nobody in Crimea, particularly here in Sevastopol, shows any sign of heeding. With nearly every other main street named after a Russian military hero or a gruesome battle, its lovely seafront promenade dominated by a "monument to sunken ships" and its central square named after the imperial admiral who commanded Russian forces against French, British and Turkish troops in the 19th century, Sevastopol constantly feeds thoughts of war and its agonies.
Bombarded with reminders of the Crimean War, which involved a near yearlong siege of the city in 1854-55, and World War II, when the city doggedly resisted Nazi forces until finally falling in July 1942, Sevastopol has never stopped thinking about wartime losses - and has never been able to cope with the amputation carried out in 1954 by the Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev.
Comment: The significance of this article placed today in the New York Times, lies in the fact that this is the first time this week that an establishment media source has pointed out that the Crimea is really much more Russian than Ukrainian and that it has only been part of the Ukraine for sixty years. Taken together with the fact that the U.S. stock market has risen since the sharp drop on Monday at the outset of the latest phase of the crisis, this indicates that the crisis is settling down and that Russia will keep Crimea, the rest of Ukraine will lean towards the west.
There will be a lot of yelling and stamping of feet among the political and media types in the U.S., but the outline of the deal is clear. The western banks will get Ukraine, the IMF will administer the country and impose austerity, and the inevitable "IMF Riot" once the working class in the Ukraine wakes up to how much they have been fooled will be brutally suppressed by fascist thugs in the new government. Russia will get the Crimea and keep naval access to the Black Sea and the Great Game for control of energy resources in Central Asia and the Middle East will continue.
Comment: See: Useless eater Hillary Clinton compares Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler