Some 800 Turkish journalists were fired and nearly 160 others arrested last year, a senior member of the country's main opposition party says. The Republican People's Party (CHP) deputy head, Sezgin Tanrıkulu, said on Monday that last year 774 Turkish journalists were sacked, 156 others were detained, and court cases were opened against 238 member of the press.

Recalling Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Sunday message on respect for press freedom, Tanrıkulu said the message should be embraced by everybody, adding, however, that the current situation in Turkey resembles one in which democracy is "bankrupt." There has been growing concern about deteriorating press freedom in Turkey and, in particular, over the number of journalists facing legal proceedings on accusations of insulting or criticizing top officials.

Many media reports in recent months have revealed Ankara's role in providing support to the terror groups active in Syria. In June last year, center-left Turkish daily Cumhuriyet released a video, implicating the country's National Intelligence Organization (MİT) in assisting the Daesh Takfiri terrorists operating against the Syrian government.

Irked by the revelations, the Turkish president threatened that Can Dundar, the daily's editor-in-chief, would "pay a heavy price" for publishing the video. Also in June 2015, Turkish newspaper Today's Zaman revealed that Ankara allows Daesh terrorists to freely walk on the streets of the Akcakale border district in the Turkish province of Şanlıurfa.

British security services unsuccessfully tried to recruit terror suspect Abu Rumaysah, dubbed the 'new Jihadi John,' before he skipped bail and fled to Syria to join Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) with his pregnant wife and four children.

Officers from MI5 approached Rumaysah, a Muslim-convert born Siddhartha Dhar to a Hindu family in London, on two separate occasions, the Sunday Times reports.

A security source told the paper MI5 officers offered Rumaysah a role as an agent, and told him he would likely be killed if he went to Syria.

"Dhar was told that his life in the UK as a would-be jihadist was over. If he went to Syria, MI5 warned, he would in all likelihood be killed in battle or a drone strike. His only option was to become an agent," the source said.

Those who have been reading my work for any length of time know I have been adamant we would someday face a "global margin call". I believe this call was issued last week! No matter how you look at the world, whether financially, geopolitically, macro, micro or whatever ...what underlies everything in our world today is "credit". Credit is used to build, wage war, to produce and deliver, to consume or to trade, EVERYTHING runs on credit. As a side note, in order for credit to be extended, the borrower must have some sort of "collateral". This collateral can be physical, financial, or simply "faith", meaning a good credit rating or at least trust by the lender.

We've now arrived at a point very similar to where we were in the fall of 2008 with several very grave exceptions. The world is facing a global margin call again, only this time there are no sovereign entities left with a clean balance sheet that can be levered up further. There are also no tools left available to the various central banks to administer monetary policy. They have already printed, monetized debt and lowered rates to zero. Richard Fisher has even admitted they have no ammunition left! As a side note, rates were cut to zero to make the higher debt balances serviceable but now even zero percent rates are not enough. From a macro standpoint, real economic activity is not generating enough cash flow (profits and tax revenues) to support this current debt. Lastly, there is no more "collateral" left to borrow against. Whether it be stocks, bonds, real estate, commodities or even "faith", we are at the end of the road in the collateral department.

The deteriorating ties between the US and Saudi Arabia is primarily due to Washington's declining influence in the Middle East and its shift toward Iran, an American analyst says.

"Instead of being the hegemon-- the dominant power that rules over all of Middle East-- the United States is now an empire in decline, its authority is challenged," said Brian Becker, the national coordinator for the ANSWER Coalition, a US-based protest umbrella group consisting of many antiwar and civil rights organizations.

"The Middle East and the network of authority through which the United States controlled a great deal of the Middle East has come undone as a consequence" of US military interventions, Becker told Press TV on Monday.

The analyst also noted that the nuclear agreement reached between Tehran and world powers in July "has created great fear and anxiety within the Saudi regime. The Saudis are pursuing a policy based on fear, fear that peace can break out in the Middle East between the United States and Iran," he said.

The United States in the past year dropped more than 20,000 bombs on Muslim-majority countries Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, according to a study by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

In an article published January 7, Micah Zenko, a senior fellow at CFR, states that since January 1, 2015, the United States has dropped an estimated 23,144 bombs in those six countries: 22,110 in Iraq and Syria; 947 in Afghanistan; 58 in Yemen; 18 in Somalia; and 11 in Pakistan.

"This estimate is based on the fact that the United States has conducted 77 percent of all airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, while there were 28,714 US-led coalition munitions dropped in 2015. This overall estimate is probably slightly low, because it also assumes one bomb dropped in each drone strike in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, which is not always the case," Zenko writes.

Despite dropping tens of thousands of bombs over the past 17 months, Washington's strategy has failed to defeat Daesh and other Islamic militant groups, Zenko observed.

Russia's air force has hit 1,100 jihadist targets in Syria since the start of the year, enabling "patriotic" Syrian rebels to mount an offensive against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) strongholds in Raqqa and Palmyra.

"Russian aviation is providing support for all the patriotic forces fighting against international terrorists on Syria's territory. Today, we are attacking targets on behalf of 11 democratic opposition militias, numbering over 7,000 in total," Lieutenant General Sergey Rudskoy, chief of the main operations department of the Russian General Staff, said during a televised press briefing in Moscow.

Specifically, 19 air strikes were unleashed on targets specified by Jaysh Ahrar al-Ashaer, or the Army of Free Tribes, which is a constituent unit of the Free Syrian Army - the 'moderate' wing of the anti-Bashar Assad opposition that has been endorsed by the West since the conflict broke out in 2011.


"With support of the Russian aviation, the Syrian democratic army detachments, under the command of Aiman Flyat al-Ganim, have continued an offensive on the IS capital Raqqa and seized the settlements of Al-Salhiya, Rjeman-Alaya, El-Kria and Hadriyat-Ain-Isa in recent days," said Rudskoy. The general said rebels had achieved success in their counter-offensives "on all fronts," as airstrikes have inflicted "considerable losses of manpower and equipment."

The nation's attention turned to Oregon this week when a group calling itself Citizens for Constitutional Freedom seized control of part of a federal wildlife refuge. The citizens were protesting the harsh sentences given to members of the Hammond ranching family. The Hammonds were accused of allowing fires set on their property to spread onto federal land.

The Hammonds were prosecuted under a federal terrorism statute. This may seem odd, but many prosecutors are stretching the definition of terrorism in order to, as was the case here, apply the mandatory minimum sentences or otherwise violate defendants' constitutional rights. The first judge to hear the case refused to grant the government's sentencing request, saying his conscience was shocked by the thought of applying the mandatory minimums to the Hammonds. Fortunately for the government, it was able to appeal the decision to judges whose consciences were not shocked by draconian sentences.

When it comes to Texas' relationship with the Federal government, the word "rocky" comes to mind. And nobody embodies said rockiness better than Texas governor Greg Abbott, who recently made headlines after announcing that irrelevant of D.C.'s demands, Texas would refuse to accept any Syrian refugees.

This followed his announcement earlier this summer 2015 when fears over nebulous Federal intentions with operation "Jade Helm" were running high, that "to address concerns that Texas citizens and to ensure that Texas communities remain safe, secure, and informed about military procedures occurring in their vicinity, I am directing the state guard to monitor Operation Jade Helm 15."

Prior to this, Abbott was again in the news back in June when he signed a bill into law that would allow Texas to build a gold and silver bullion depository, which would allow Texas to repatriate $1 billion worth of bullion from the New York Fed to the new facility once completed.

In short: the Federal government and the state of Texas have been on collision course of many months, one which culminated on Friday when Abbott called for a Constitutional Convention of states, spearheaded by Texas, and which would amend the U.S. Constitution to wrest power from a federal government "run amok."

Al-Qaeda has pledged to take revenge against Saudi Arabia by saying the Gulf state will pay for executing dozens of the terrorist group's members, and promised to "deal" with the kingdom.

Al-Qaeda's Yemeni branch and its North African affiliate called the mass executions, staged by Saudi Arabia on January 2, "a foolish act" - adding that the kingdom had disregarded previous warnings from the group and vowing to "avenge" the "blood of their brothers," AFP reports.

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb called the executions a New Year "gift" to "Crusaders," apparently referring to Saudi Arabia's Western allies in a statement posted on social media.

I was surprised to learn that many Turkish people on social media have been supporting Turkey's President Erdoğan's actions and stance, whether it concerned the unlawful downing of a Russian jet, its cruel treatment of Kurdish civilians living in Turkey, or its oil dealings with terrorists. Some of them even go as far as rooting for a come-back of the Ottoman Empire. But how many of them know about the real recent history of the Late Ottoman Empire, and the many innocent people who died during that time?

"[Professor of Modern History] Christian Gerlach ... claims that societies like the ones in the Late Ottoman Empire or in Nazi Germany are characterized by mass violence against numerous political, religious or ethnic groups instead of only one."
- Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer

As the quote above suggests, the Young Turk era (1906-1918) of the late Ottoman Empire bore a lot of similarities to Hitler's Germany. In Late Ottoman Genocides, historians Schaller and Zimmerer write: "A new generation of historians working on World War II and the German war of extermination in Eastern Europe have ... shown that the Nazis' "struggle for Lebensraum" was not only directed against the Jews - though they held an out-standing position as ultimate arch enemies in Hitler's ideology - but also affected Poles, Russians, Roma and several other groups." In similar fashion, the Late Ottoman Empire, in its desire to create a homogenous empire consisting of only Turks, set out to exterminate different non-Turkish groups: Assyrians, Armenians, Greeks, and Kurds, among others.

The Young Turks leaders' systematic policy of violent 'turkification' first targeted the Greeks: "More than 100,000 Ottoman Greeks were expelled from the Aegean and Thrace to create living space for Muslim refugees who had themselves been brutally driven away from Crete and the Balkans. Hundreds of thousands of Greeks were deported from the coastal regions to the interior due to alleged strategic reasons during the war. Finally the anti-Greek campaign of the Young Turks found its continuation in [Turkey's first President] Mustafa Kemal's expulsion of the Ottoman Greeks. The burning of Smyrna [known today as İzmir, Turkey] and the slaughter of its Christian inhabitants in 1922 marked the symbolic end of Greek presence in Turkey." The massacres and forced deportations had cost the lives of up to one million Greeks.

Approximately 300,000 Assyrians residing in the Ottoman Empire were murdered; their villages were burned, and churches were destroyed. The number of Armenians who were targeted by the Young Turks' policy in 1915 however exceeded that of the others, with up to 1.5 million Armenians meeting their death by either being burned alive - sometimes in groups of only women and children - or dying from starvation and fatigue on the death marches leading to the Syrian desert. While some Kurds joined Ottoman soldiers in murdering, raping and looting Armenians, some Kurdish groups such as the Alevis from Dersim [today Tunceli Provence, Turkey] gave refuge to Armenians. As a result, they too were not exempted from the Young Turks' brutality. During World War I, up to 700,000 Kurds - including the perpetrators - were forcibly removed with approximately half of the displaced perishing.