Protesters wave Russian flags at Trump rally https://t.co/xG0hzDGHqO via @YouTube— Mike Nova (@mikenov) April 30, 2017
BBC News - World: Trump attacks US media at 100-day rally
World News Review: Woodward and Bernstein defend a free press against President Trump
U.S. National Security and Military News Review: U.S. Confirms It Will Pay for Antimissile System, South Korea Says
Voice of America: Swiss Climber Dies in Fall Near Everest:
An experienced Swiss climber died Sunday after he fell in the Everest region of Nepal during preparations to climb the world’s highest mountain, the first to perish in the current climbing season, officials said. Ueli Steck, 40, died after falling to the foot of Mount Nuptse, a smaller peak in the area, said Mingma Sherpa of the Seven Summits Treks company that organized Steck’s expedition. Steck was in the area acclimatizing ahead of a bid to climb Everest through the less-climbed West Ridge route and traverse to Lhotse, the world’s fourth highest peak, at 8,516 meters (27,940 feet) in May. “His body has been retrieved and is being brought to Kathmandu,” Sherpa told Reuters.
Eurasia Review: Russia Is Trying To Influence Iran’s Presidential Elections – OpEd by Arab News
U.S. National Security and Military News Review: Eurasia Review: The Card Table Turned Upside Down: The First 6.8% Of Donald Trump Presidency – Analysis by Elcano Royal Institute
Eurasia Review: Russia Steps In To Fill Vacuum In Libya – Analysis by Geopolitical Monitor
Eurasia Review: 10 Percent Decline In Number Of Births In Russia Over Last Year Frightens Economists – OpEd
russia france - Google News: Russian police detain dozens of anti-Putin protesters - FRANCE 24
Voice of America: Crash of Cuban Military Plane Kills 8:
Eight troops were killed Saturday when a Cuban military plane crashed, a statement from the military said. The Soviet-made AN-26 aircraft took off from Playa Baracoa airport near Havana early Saturday and crashed into a hillside near Candelaria, in Artemisa province, about 65 kilometers southwest of the capital, the statement said. No other information was released.
Russia - Google News: Investments in Russia become focus in congressional race - FOX19
Voice of America: For Russia and US, Uneasy Cooperation on Cybercrime Is Now a Mess
Why not a probe of Israel-gate?
Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein on Trump-Russia investigation: 'Oh my god, there's a cover-up going on' - The Independent
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Published on Apr 30, 2017
Protesters held up Russian flags as president Trump addressed a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on his 100th day in office. Two men carried the flags, which bore the name Trump. The protest came as the president criticised the media
Protesters held up Russian flags as president Trump addressed a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on his 100th day in office. Two men carried the flags, which bore the name Trump. The protest came as the president criticised the media
Trump Invites Rodrigo Duterte to the White House
New York Times - 6 hours ago
President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines spoke at the Association of South East Asian Nations in Manila on Sunday. Credit Mark R. Cristino/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images. WASHINGTON — President Trump on Saturday invited the president of ...
Donald Trump invites Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte to White House
ABC News - 6 hours ago
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte addresses the media during his joint press statement with Indonesian President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo following their bilateral meeting at the Malacanang Palace in Manila, Philippines Friday, April 28, 2017. When ...
Trump invites Philippines' Duterte to Washington for talks
Yahoo News - 5 hours ago
US President Donald Trump on Saturday invited his Philippine counterpart to Washington in a "friendly" call in which the leaders discussed Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs and their countries' alliance, the White House said. Duterte has faced ...
Philippines says Trump called Duterte to affirm alliance
San Francisco Chronicle - 4 hours ago
Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte gestures while addressing the media following the conclusion of the 30th ASEAN Leaders' Summit in Manila, Philippines, Saturday, April 29, 2017. Duterte suggested Saturday to his American counterpart to back out ...
Trump invites Philippines' Duterte to the White House
KSBW The Central Coast - 4 hours ago
President Donald Trump invited his polarizing Philippines counterpart to the White House during a phone call in which the two leaders discussed North Korea. Advertisement. Trump and President Rodrigo Duterte had a "friendly discussion" Saturday that ...
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Published on Apr 29, 2017
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of Watergate fame spoke Saturday night at the annual White House correspondents' dinner.
The FBI, the New York-based Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers are examining nearly 3,000 cases nationwide in which the FBI may have misused microscopic hair comparison.
The review so far found statements and findings that “exceeded the limits of the science” in more than 90 percent of the cases. The errors fall into three broad categories:
Claiming a ‘match’
What they did: Examiners stated or implied that the evidentiary hair could be associated with a specific individual to the exclusion of all others.
Why it was wrong: Absent DNA testing, hairs are not unique enough to be associated with one person, even by looking at them under a high-powered microscope.
Claiming a statistical weight
What they did: Examiners assigned a statistical weight, probability or likelihood that the questioned hair originated from a particular source.
Why it was wrong: No such weight can be assigned because no one knows how many people have microscopically identical hair.
Citing experience to bolster findings
What they did: Examiners cited statistics such as the number of hair cases they or the FBI lab had handled to bolster the findings.
Why it was wrong: Unlike DNA, there is no database of hair profiles. Analysts cannot memorize every hair they have ever examined. And comparing vast numbers of hairs — even billions — does not change the fact that an unknown number of people have hair that looks identical.
Sources: National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers; FBI; Skip Palenik, Microtrace LLC.
The US has sent a group of US Marines armed with eight-wheeled Stryker armored carriers to northern Syria as a buffer between Syrian Kurds and Turkish forces, after Turkish air strikes killed 20 members of the US-backed Kurdish YPG (People’s Protection Units) militia, injured 18 and destroyed the local Kurdish command headquarters. Clashes broke out between Turkish and Kurdish forces after the air strikes.
The convoy of US armored vehicles took up positions at the village of Darbasiyah in the northeastern Hasakah province, a few hundred meters from the Turkey border.
The convoy of US armored vehicles took up positions at the village of Darbasiyah in the northeastern Hasakah province, a few hundred meters from the Turkey border.
It was the second time American armored troops had stepped in to separate Turkish and the Kurdish YPG militia that leads the Syrian Democratic Force (SDF), to which the Americans assign a major role in the offensive to capture Raqqa from ISIS. On March 17, US Marines advanced towards the northern Syrian town of Manbij when the Turkish army was on the point of fighting the Kurdish militia for control of the town.
However, on April 24, the Turkish air force went into action against the PKK (Kurdish Workers Party) base near Sinjar on Mount Karachok in Iraq, wiping out ammunition dumps and weapons store - but also against a YPG command center in northeastern Syria, claiming they were both hubs of a conjoined terrorist entity.
By its twin operation, Ankara emphasized that Turkey was very much present in the Syrian and Iraqi arenas and informed Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin that Turkey’s view of its national security interests in those arenas took precedence over helping to promote the two powers’ objectives.
The Pentagon responded Friday, April 28, that the US wants the SDF to focus on liberating the ISIS-held town of Tabqa and the ISIS capital of Raqqa “and not be drawn into conflicts elsewhere.”
The movements of Turkish jets in Syrian air space are routinely reported and coordinated in advance with Russian and American air force command centers in Syria. The YPG commanders therefore took note that neither the Russians nor the Americans chose to warn Turkey off its plans to hammer the US-aligned Kurdish militia. They feared this would happen when they threw in their lot with the American forces. But the US command in Syria promised them protection under an American ground and aerial umbrella.
After the Turkish attack, the Trump administration, seeing the Kurdish militia had one foot out of the door of the alliance versus ISIS, was forced to choose between losing the operation’s spearhead or spreading the American umbrella to avert more Turkish attacks.
After the Turkish attack, the Trump administration, seeing the Kurdish militia had one foot out of the door of the alliance versus ISIS, was forced to choose between losing the operation’s spearhead or spreading the American umbrella to avert more Turkish attacks.
By sending another contingent of marines over to Syria - “We have US forces that are there throughout the. entire northern Syria that operate with our Syrian Democratic Force partners,” Pentagon spokesman Army Capt. Jeff Davis said – President Donald Trump made a fateful choice: In the face of Turkish President Tayyip Edrogan’s threats of all-out war on the Kurds, he decided to commit US military forces to keeping the Kurdish militia safe under the US military wing and fully focused on the main objective of defeating ISIS.
The potential of a rare military run-in between two members of NATO may now be in store for the US president. And pretty soon, there may be fireworks when he sits down opposite Erdogan at the NATO summit in Brussels on May 25.
The potential of a rare military run-in between two members of NATO may now be in store for the US president. And pretty soon, there may be fireworks when he sits down opposite Erdogan at the NATO summit in Brussels on May 25.
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President Rodrigo Duterte’s spokesman says U.S. President Donald Trump has called the Philippine leader and expressed Washington’s commitment to their treaty alliance and his interest in developing “a warm, working relationship” with Duterte.
World
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The Racist, Hate-Preaching 'Anti'-Fascists Are Back
American Thinker It is interesting, therefore, that Hillary's favorite Muslim Brotherhood representative, Huma Abedin, was raised in Saudi Arabia until the age of sixteen. Saudi Arabia allows only one kind of religious children indoctrination, the kind generously ... |
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of Watergate fame argued Saturday night that good journalism is more crucial to a free society than ever in a climate of increasing hostility between the White House and the press.
World News Review
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) -- President Donald Trump is turning from his dramatic debut as an outsider president to focus on advancing his plans to cut taxes and get tough on trade deals....
AP Top News at 3:55 a.m. EDT
Column: The crisis of Western Civ
Bend Bulletin We are leaving the age of Obama, Cameron and Merkel and entering the age of Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump. Recent events in Turkey were just another part of the trend ... |
CIO Today |
Cyberattacks Against Saudi Arabia
CIO Today More than a month after the U.S. Department of Justice charged a Lithuanian man in a $100 million phishing scam against two Internet companies, an investigation by Fortune has confirmed the victims' identities: Google and Facebook. Between 2013 and ... Google, Facebook just fell victim to a phishing scam: The takeaway for CIOsTechTarget (blog) all 99 news articles » |
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President Trump said last week that South Korea should pay for the so-called Thaad system, but officials said Sunday that the original agreement would not change.
U.S. National Security and Military News Review
2 мая в Сочи Владимир Путин проведёт переговоры с Федеральным канцлером ФРГ Ангелой Меркель.
Лидеры обсудят текущее состояние и перспективы двусторонних отношений, в том числе сотрудничество в энергетической, торгово-экономической и культурно-гуманитарной сферах.
Планируется затронуть ключевые международные проблемы, включая борьбу с терроризмом, ситуацию на Ближнем Востоке, реализацию Минских договорённостей по урегулированию украинского кризиса.
Главы государств также обменяются мнениями в связи с предстоящим в июле в Гамбурге саммитом «Группы двадцати».
3 мая по приглашению Владимира Путина Президент Турецкой Республики Реджеп Тайип Эрдоган посетит Россию с рабочим визитом.
В ходе предстоящих переговоров в Сочи лидеры обменяются мнениями по всему комплексу российско-турецких отношений, в том числе в контексте договорённостей, достигнутых на состоявшемся 10 марта в Москве шестом заседании Совета сотрудничества высшего уровня.
Предполагается также рассмотреть актуальные региональные и международные проблемы, прежде всего касающиеся совместной борьбы с терроризмом и урегулирования сирийского кризиса.
The comments by Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster appeared to undo President Trump’s remark earlier that South Korea should pay for the Thaad system.
WSJ.com: World News
‘We are not the enemy of the American people,’ said the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, Jeff Mason, at the event on Saturday. Host Hasan Minhaj’s main target was Donald Trump’s absence from the event
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Британец по мобильному приложению отследил маршрут самолета-шпиона НАТО, выполнявшего полет над Балтикой. Boeing королевских ВВС собирал информацию о базе Балтфлота
Российская Газета
Russia News Review
Российская Газета
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KATHMANDU (Reuters) - An experienced Swiss climber died on Sunday after he fell in the Everest region of Nepal during preparations to climb the world's highest mountain, the first to perish in the current climbing season, officials said.
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Voice of America: Swiss Climber Dies in Fall Near Everestby webdesk@voanews.com (Reuters)
An experienced Swiss climber died Sunday after he fell in the Everest region of Nepal during preparations to climb the world’s highest mountain, the first to perish in the current climbing season, officials said. Ueli Steck, 40, died after falling to the foot of Mount Nuptse, a smaller peak in the area, said Mingma Sherpa of the Seven Summits Treks company that organized Steck’s expedition. Steck was in the area acclimatizing ahead of a bid to climb Everest through the less-climbed West Ridge route and traverse to Lhotse, the world’s fourth highest peak, at 8,516 meters (27,940 feet) in May. “His body has been retrieved and is being brought to Kathmandu,” Sherpa told Reuters. Other details were not immediately available. Kamal Prasad Parajuli, an official with Nepal’s Department of Tourism, confirmed Steck died while climbing Nuptse and that he had planned to attempt an Everest ascent. Hundreds of climbers are at Everest base camp as they prepare to climb the 8,850 meter (29,035 feet) Everest Summit in the current March-May climbing season.
Voice of America
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At least he writes his own tweets.
A packed hall in 1947 for a speech by Eugene Dennis, a longtime leader of the Communist Party in the United States.
Lessons From 100 Days of President Trumpby By NICHOLAS KRISTOF
The Republic stands, but it’s a long time until noon Jan. 20, 2021.
When I took the oath of office, I pledged to transfer political power from Washington, D.C., back to the people.
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Unless both sides bend, there can be no resolution. Imaginative leadership is essential
It has long been considered axiomatic, at least on Europe’s political left, that Palestine lies at the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict and that lasting peace in the Middle East depends, first and foremost, on resolution of this decades-old struggle. In recent years, such thinking has been overtaken by events. The problem has been sidelined. Yet as the region approaches the 50th anniversary of the six-day war that left Palestinian land under permanent occupation, and as hundreds of Palestinian prisoners begin their third week on hunger strike in Israeli jails, fears of a new intifada are growing. It is time to refocus attention on this dangerous stalemate before it again explodes into open, violent confrontation.
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Options against North Korea are limited, especially if Trump gets on the wrong side of Seoul with his comments.
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Both nations have moved armored vehicles to the region.
World
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By Ghazanfar Ali Khan
Saudi Arabia and Germany will sign several agreements during the visit of Chancellor Angela Merkel, who will arrive in Jeddah on Sunday, German Ambassador Dieter W. Haller said on Saturday.
“Merkel will hold wide-ranging talks with high-ranking Saudi officials, including King Salman, on Sunday,” he said, adding that she will also hold consultations with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Naif and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
“The talks… will focus on bilateral relations, fields of cooperation between the two countries, further possibilities of collaboration, and regional and international developments,” Haller added. “The next meeting of the G20 will also feature in the talks, with Germany hosting the G20 Summit on July 7 this year in Hamburg.”
Asked about details of the deals to be signed during Merkel’s visit, Haller said: “It Is a bit early to announce them as the two sides are still finalizing and fine-tuning the agreements.”
Asked about details of the deals to be signed during Merkel’s visit, Haller said: “It Is a bit early to announce them as the two sides are still finalizing and fine-tuning the agreements.”
A meeting of Saudi and German businessmen will be held at the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce and Industry on the sidelines of Merkel’s visit on April 30 and May 1. Merkel will meet Saudi businesswomen to learn more about social and economic developments in the Kingdom.
The German Embassy said she will be accompanied by a high-level economic delegation headed by the secretary of state at the Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, and will include CEOs of the largest German companies interested in the economic changes taking place in the Kingdom within the frameworks of Vision 2030 and the National Transformation Program (NTP) 2020.
Merkel will wrap up her visit on Monday and travel to Abu Dhabi.
Saudi Arabia and Germany are close allies, with diplomatic relations established in 1954. Bilateral ties are fostered by regular high-level visits in both directions.
The late King Abdullah visited Germany in November 2007, and Merkel visited Saudi Arabia in 2007 and 2010.
Riyadh and Berlin have forged close commercial ties. Saudi Arabia is Germany’s second-biggest trading partner in the Arab world after the UAE. Germany is the third-largest supplier of Saudi imports. Imports of German products and services rose in 2015 and 2016 despite falling oil prices.
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Это позволит подавать воду в районы, граничащие с админграницей.
Ukraine News
By Amir Taheri*
For four decades, Tehranis have heard so many weird slogans chanted in their streets that almost nothing comes as a surprise to them. Yet last week many Tehranis were surprised to hear a group of youths, all adorned with suitable beards, shouting: “Russian Embassy is a Nest of Spies!”
“Nest of Spies” was first launched in 1979 by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as a label for the US Embassy which had been raided and which diplomats were held hostage by the so-called “Students Following the Lead of Imam.”
The operation that provoked a 444-day stand-off between Tehran and Washington had been quietly encouraged by KGB elements in Tehran working through the Tudeh (Communist) Party and its smaller left-wing affiliates as a means of driving the US out of Iran.
At the time, no one could imagine that one-day it would be the Russian Embassy’s turn to be thus labeled. True, Iran already has a history of raiding the Russian Embassy. In 1829, a mob, led by mullahs, attacked the Tsarist Embassy ostensibly to release two Georgian slave girls who had sought refuge there. Alexander Griboidev, the ambassador was seized, sentenced to death with a fatwa and beheaded. (Griboidev was more than a diplomat and had made a name as a poet and playwright.)
It is, of course, unlikely that the regime would allow anyone today to raid the Russian Embassy and seize its diplomats as hostages. Nevertheless, the anger expressed by the small bunch of demonstrators is real.
But why has the Russian Embassy become a target for militant anger some four decades later?
The question is all the more pertinent as the “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei has launched what he calls a “Looking East” strategy based on an alliance between Tehran and Moscow.
That strategy is in direct violation of Khomeini’s famous: “Neither East nor West” (Na sharqi, na gharbi!) slogan. Khomeini insisted that unless Russia converted to Islam, it should not expect to be treated any differently than other “infidel” powers. (The ayatollah sent a formal letter to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, inviting him to embrace Shiism.)
However, two years ago, in a four-hour long summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Khamenei agreed that his Islamic Republic would take no position on major international issues without “coordinating” with Moscow. That historic accord was quickly put into effect in Syria where Putin provided air cover for an alliance of forces assembled by Iran around the beleaguered President Bashar Assad.
Putin played a key role in exempting Iran from cuts in its oil production under an agreement between OPEC and non-OPEC producers to stabilize prices.
Putin also lifted the ban on sale of advanced surface-to-air missile systems that Iran says it needs to face any US air attack. At the same time, Moscow has done quite a lot to shield the Islamic Republic against further concessions on the thorny issue of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Putin went even further by tacitly acknowledging Iran’s lead in shaping policy toward Iraq and Afghanistan.
Working in favor of strategic alliance with Moscow are several elements within the Iranian regime. These include the remnants of the Tudeh, the People Fedayeen Militia and assorted groups of anti-West activists. However, the proposed alliance also enjoys support from powerful clerics who believe they need Russian support to face any future clash with the US.
“By courageously defending the Syrian government, Russia has proved it is a true friend,” says Ayatollah Muhammadi Golpayegani, who heads Khamenei’s personal Cabinet.
However, to sweeten the bitter pill of alliance with Russia, a power which has a 200-year long history of enmity and war with Iran, the mullahs also claim they could seize the opportunity to spread their brand of Islam in the Russian Federation where Shiite account for less than three percent of the estimated 30 million Muslims. (The only place where Shiites are in a majority is Darband in Dagestan.)
In his typically sly way, Putin has encouraged such illusions. He has promised to let Qom set up seminaries in both Darband and Moscow to train Russian Shiite mullahs. Putin has also set up something called “Strategic Committee for the Spread of Islam” led by Tatarstan’s President Rustam Minikhanov. (Tatarstan is the largest Muslim majority republic in the Russian federation.)
Having allegedly tried to influence the latest presidential election in the US and the current presidential election in France, Putin is also accused of trying to do the same in Iran.
Last week, he sent a 60-man delegation, led by Minikhanov, to Mash’had, Iran’s largest “holy” city to meet Ayatollah Ibrahim Raisi, the man regarded as one of the two candidates most likely to win the presidency.
Minikhanov was accompanied by Tatarstan’s Grand Mufti Kamil Sami Gulen who told reporters that Putin wants Iran and Russia to work together to “present the true face of Islam to young people” and “counter propaganda by terrorist circles.”
Kremlin-controlled satellite TV channels have played up the meetings, casting Raisi as a statesman of international standing.
However, to hedge his bets, Putin had already received the incumbent President Hassan Rouhani during a hastily arrange visit to Moscow last month. However, some observers claim that Putin regards Rouhani and his faction as “too close to the Americans.”
Some senior members of Rouhani’s administration who are rumored to be US citizens or holders of “Green Cards,” may cast doubt on their sincerity to embrace a strategic alliance with Moscow.
There are signs that not everyone in the regime is happy about tying Iran’s future to that of the Putin regime. The slogan “Russian Embassy is Nest of Spies” is just one small example of that unhappiness.
Other examples include a series of features published by the official media, including IRNA, about Russia historic aggression against Iran.
One curious feature published by IRNA even claimed that US President Harry S. Truman helped Iran recover two of its provinces occupied by Russian despot Stalin in 1946. Another feature, published by a news agency close to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard narrates the “shameful” history of pro-Russian factions in Iran from the 19th century onwards.
An old Persian saying claims Russia is a big bear to admire from afar; if he embraces you he will crush you.
*Amir Taheri was executive editor in chief of the daily Kayhan in Iran from 1972 to 1979. He worked at, or wrote for innumerable publications and published 11 books.
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Donald Trump attacks US media and says he has kept "one promise after another", as he marks 100 days in office.
BBC News - World
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The first 100 days of the Trump Presidency have come to an end.
By Paul Isbell*
Donald Trump’s first 100 days as President have been full of high drama and controversy. While the President has attempted to push a number of his campaign proposals onto the domestic agenda, so far there has been no major legislation passed. His most high-profile executive orders are currently blocked in the courts. His Administration’s tone on trade policy has dramatically moderated, and while the rhetoric on foreign policy bounces back and forth between ‘Jacksonian’ and ‘neorealist’, actual diplomacy has played the good cop, bringing the US posture back to something very close to the pre-Trump status quo. But North Korea is threatening war and President Trump might have to celebrate his first 100 days on Saturday after his government shuts down on Friday… unless the President, or his men, broker a deal.
Analysis
Introduction
The outline of the first 100 days of the Trump Administration –or the first 6.8% of the Trump Presidency– is now at least vaguely clear to all who have been observing it.
To some conservative and libertarian commentators, Trump’s first months have been characterised by bold yet rational politics, by a coherent logic in conception and by a competent flexibility and a dogged insistence in execution. Most of these colleagues have also apologised for a number of Trumpisms –which previously in the post-Wall period would likely have been considered outrageous enough for disqualification or simply legally unacceptable– by an easy and reasonable appeal to the ‘learning curve’.
Such apologists for Trump, his policies and actions thus far, and the performance of his Administration, clearly live within –or yearn for– the famed ‘heartland’ bubble. This is not to deny that nearly everyone else on the planet –some 7 billion souls or so– also live within their own respective bubble(s). But these others, including over half of all Americans, should be forgiven for perceiving that Donald Trump is simply riding the whirlwind –just as Lawrence of Arabia once did–. But because Trump appears to act more like a Peter Sellers than a Peter O’Toole, everyone should keep in mind that we are all riding the whirlwind with him.
The policy and political terrain
After an unconventional Inaugural Address –clearly the most gnarly, for lack of a better word, in the annals of US history, even considering Andrew Jackson– Trump proceeded to invoke his ‘travel ban’ on those attempting to enter the US from six Muslim countries. The executive order landed immediately in the courts, where his second attempt is now also bogged down as unconstitutional.
The new ‘American Health Care Act’ then died in the Republican-held congress where the party centre no longer seems to hold against the centrifugal forces exerted by its respective diverging wings: the conservative and libertarian Freedom House caucus, on the one side, and a budding moderate centrist grouping, on the other. In any event, the ill-fated, first attempt of House Speaker Paul Ryan to replace the ACA (also known as ‘Obamacare’) with a new Republican plan would have amounted to little more than a transfer of income to the relatively-wealthy from the middle and lower classes.
The new version, which is still being cobbled together, is basically the same as the original, say some of its new-found conservative backers, but it does allow states to opt out of requiring insurance companies to share in ‘cost reductions’ –the Obamacare subsidies and other regulatory protections that the Freedom Caucus wants reduced, if not eliminated altogether, and that the moderate wing is very reluctant to see go–. Although there is talk of rearticulating another bill to quickly replace the clearly misunderstood Obamacare, it is unlikely that anything of significance will happen on this front anytime soon.
However, the Senate did manage to eliminate the filibuster on Supreme Court nominees, so Trump’s pick to fill the late Judge Scalia’s vacant seat, Neil Gorsuch, has finally been confirmed by the Senate. The dominant line argues that this secures a conservative majority on the court, and that this new equilibrium of forces might free up some of Trump’s legally-challenged executive orders (like those concerning travel and immigration, and perhaps others to come) from the restraint of the judicial branch, as well as help secure the boundaries of a more conservative political space, in general, within the country.
Yet the major campaign issues on the domestic front –immigration, health care and trade protectionism– have essentially stalled, and been sent back to the end of the long line of campaign promises. For such issues to get another chance to bat would inevitably require a long uphill series of political compromises, a ‘dance of legislation’ that would eventually hammer any such bills into an at least recognisably ‘Republican’ shape. In any event, nothing really new can come out of the Congress with its current geopolitical configuration. On the other hand, the Justice Department, under Jeff Sessions, can and is pursuing more aggressive deportation. But that, too, can be stopped and bogged down by the courts.
Even Trump’s protectionist trade policy –his tariff threats to China and Mexico, and other smoke signals of economic warfare, with their dual domestic and international dimensions– has now been pushed farther back in the line of the Administration’s concerns. Very possibly, at Mar-a-Lago, Trump agreed to drop the economic hostility towards China, if China would bring North Korea back from the nuclear brink. Perhaps Xi Jinping even agreed to let Trump take credit for it, so that the latter might be able to distract away, by such sleight-of-hand, any resulting disappointment or bafflement among his staff and advisors and among his electoral base (many of whom have been enthusiastically expecting a new rapprochement with Russia in a combined military fight against ISIS and possibly even a collaborative containment of China and an end to the ‘global liberal-democratic order’). In addition, Trump just conceded to Mexico that NAFTA would not be scrapped but merely renegotiated (as it probably would have been, at some stage, with or without Trump).
Energy policy is the one realm where Trump started out as ‘standard Republican’ –striving for energy independence and favouring domestic fossil fuels–. So far, he has not wavered from such a position and so far he can claim a Pyrrhic victory. Trump’s energy independence executive order began the long haul of overturning most of Obama’s energy and climate policies. But the ‘standard Republican’ energy policy is both rickety and redundant. Such supply side measures –ie, easier fiscal and access conditions for domestic fossil fuel producers, along with significant reduction in energy regulation in general– will offer some business opportunities to those in the right place at the right time within the US fossil heartlands. But the biggest effect of Trump’s new energy policies will be to boost natural gas production, a development that will doom coal as surely as the chainsaw doomed Paul Bunyan.
Indeed, the totality of Trump’s energy policy will ultimately mean very little for domestic oil production, which now more than ever ebbs and flows with world price –which in turn (n)OPEC can influence sometimes, but only in the short run, and at the margin, even when the principal fossil fuel producers of the Great Crescent effectively cooperate to restrict supply–.
We are also told that clarification of Trump’s position on the Paris accord will arrive soon; but it in the end, this too will matter little. The battle for dominance of the global political economy between fossil fuels and renewable energies and low-carbon technologies will be played out on the ground-level of local policy landscapes and on the field of straight-up economic competition. It is a battle between the learning curves of the Trump Administration and the traditional energy sector and the learning curves of the low carbon transition and sustainable agriculture and land-use communities.
Trump’s tax plan continues to swing, like a rhetorical pendulum, between a potentially-middle-class- empowering approach and one which will reward basically, only the rich. Of course, there might be an annual income tax cut of couple of thousand dollars, on average, per family (and no more), which might be scattered like crumbs to the bottom 90%. Vast sums, in comparison, would go to the already rich. The same cloud of mystery – will this policy be conceived of for the large corporations and investors, or for the people? – hangs over the proposed ‘infrastructure plan,’ still languishing in the long line of Trump campaign promises for the first ‘100 days.’
The Administration’s budget outline suggests standard small-government, even Scrooge-like Republicanism, along with standard Cold War-style patriotism: the major cuts are targeted at the EPA (a 31% cut) to the greater benefit of the Pentagon (a 10% increase, of US$54 billion). Trump seems particularly bent on starving off the State Department. It is not just that the State Department would suffer a 24% budget cut under Trump’s current budget outlines; it is also the department where most of the President’s executive appointments remain vacant.
Perhaps all the President needs is Rex Tillerson. And perhaps Tillerson only needs his personal staff. Perhaps certain kinds of patriotism have now been deemed to be, truly, the last refuge of a scoundrel –like the ‘patriotism’ of those who assume that the benign hegemon of the world (or the closest thing to it) requires an active and engaged professional diplomacy–.
But then, behold: ExxonMobil has just applied for an exemption from US sanctions on Russia which bar the way to an exploratory drilling project in the Black Sea with Rosneft. Sanctions have reportedly cost Exxon hundreds of millions of dollars on this project, negotiated and signed back in 2011. Exxon claims to be motivated by the fact that ENI, the Italian oil company whose government has already granted it an exemption to certain Russian sanctions, could soon take their place in the 33% stake in the reserve, estimated to be as large as 7 billion barrels.
The Treasury Department has the lead role in considering Exxon’s application, and Rex Tillerson has recused himself at State (which also plays a secondary role in the approval process) from any decisions affecting the interests of the company from which he has just stepped down after a decade as its CEO. Would Trump allow for such an exemption? If he thinks it could be used as a bargaining chip in his deal making with Putin, then probably, yes.
To top it all off, now another government shutdown looms. April 29th corresponds not only with the end of the first 100 days as President for Donald Trump; the government will also shut down on that date –as current government appropriations expire then– unless an extension can pass the Republican majority-held House and Senate. Trumps wants enough Democrats to vote for the funds for his ‘border wall’ (enough, that is, to overcome the filibuster requirement in the Senate, plus any recalcitrant Republicans, meaning at least eight). But the Democrats en masse cannot avoid pointing to Trump’s proposed spending cuts at the EPA, the Department of State, etc (see above), and they are standing firm, at least for the moment.
In any event, it is not at all clear that the Republicans themselves can or will unify, even on this issue, even if that means that a Republican-held Congress and White House might actually shut themselves down, along with the other branches of federal government.
Can such a ‘hegemon’ remain ‘benign’? Can such a ‘benign’ nation remain a ‘hegemon’?
Meanwhile, in the foreign policy realm, the executives and the generals have restored relative calm along the frontiers of US global reach, claiming now essentially the opposite of what Trump had been saying about US global policy since the beginning of his campaign. Tillerson, Mattis and Pence have all made the rounds in Europe and Asia to reassure the allies that not much has really changed and that NATO is not obsolete. Commitments to allies in the Middle East, Asia and Europe are, for the moment, secure.
General Flynn was also replaced with Lieutenant-General Herbert McMaster at the head of the NSC. Syria has been lashed for using chemical weapons, Russia has been confronted again for allowing it, and China has been, at least for the moment, embraced. Meanwhile, Trump launches thinly-veiled threats of war at one of the smaller countries of the world. But then, he has also just petitioned the UN Security to place sanctions on North Korea.
How should the Allies interpret all of this? If Trump has been fast and furious on the domestic front, he has essentially inverted all of his initial (if admittedly thin) initial positions on foreign policy, even if in only an unreliably superficial or temporary way. Are these just deal-making feints? Maybe. Such appearances could shift again, as Trump continually searches for his deals, and fitfully chases the ratings.
For now, the would-be new strongman ally, Vladimir Putin, may not be feeling Trump’s love, but he hasn’t batted an eyelid any differently than he normally would have. After all, he still controls the keys to the coveted Eurasian heartland. And while Russia cannot single-handedly undermine the low carbon transition, it has more to gain from climate change, in the first order of things, than any of the other ‘great powers’. However, with enough US collusion, Russia could ensure climate-induced and geopolitically-abetted global instability for as long as the current horizon holds. This alone tells us that Russia must be dealt with –and, yes, engaged, somehow–.
Trump’s approval ratings
Perhaps the sensation of being led by the President from one carnival fun ride to another, only to come full circle, obeys no rhyme or reason except that of following the path of least resistance. Perhaps one of the keys to code-breaking Trump’s likely future directions can be found in his net approval ratings.
From the end of January through February, all through the travel ban and immigration controversies, Trump’s performance ratings steadily deteriorated. On 27 January the net approval rating of the President’s job performance –admittedly only a week into the job– was plus 0.1% (according to the average of polls tabulated by RealClearPolitics, which sums positive and negative appraisals). However, by 1 March, five weeks later, it was a negative 6.8%.
Trump’s ratings moderately improved and steadied during the first half of March (rising to a negative 4%) but they began to plummet again by mid-month and continued to deteriorate until 9 April (as the health care bill failed, and as the controversy over Trump’s links to Russia flared), when his ratings fell to a trough of 13.5% net disapproval.
Just two days before, Trump ordered the surprise strike against the Syrian airbase while meeting with Chinese President Xi in Florida. In the ensuing period to the present, the Trump Administration has confronted Putin, bombed Afghanistan and has met North Korean sabre-rattling with its own version of sabre-rattling: a somewhat amusing failure of North Korea’s ballistic missile test launch was matched by a somewhat perplexing deployment of US naval power (which took one of the longer routes available) and a counter-series of threats from Trump officials, which suggested the US is willing to wage military conflict with North Korea.
And suddenly Trump’s approval ratings improved: from 13.5% net disapproval to only 8% on 17 April.
A week later, however, by 23 April –after the development of a budget showdown between the President and Congressional Democrats over the funding of the ‘border wall’ (which could easily shut the government down), along with a number of mixed messages sent by the Justice Department and the White House concerning whether the so-called ‘Dreamers’ had reason to fear deportation– Trump’s net approval rating had dropped back down to 9.5%.
This was also a week of marches in support of science and of protests demanding the President reveal his tax returns. It also became public that billionaires, corporations and NFL owners contributed to Trump’s inaugural ceremonies in such abundance that twice as much was ultimately spent as on Obama’s inaugurations (previously the record high). Finally, it was also revealed that Trump’s entourage has been spending more than any previous White House and by a fair margin.
It is possible that the President and his ‘men’ will simply improvise and experiment in their chase for the ratings. So far, domestic policy forays tend to hurt Trump in the polls; however, his big early-to-mid April bump seems to have been driven primarily by displays of Jacksonian power from the White House and feints of ‘neo-realism’ from the Pentagon and the NSC. Perhaps this explains the recent focusing of Trump’s ‘Jacksonian’ energies in the direction of North Korea. But it might just all be a ‘two-step’ dance between domestic policy forays (little Gallipolis) which eat into his ratings, on the one hand, and displays of strength and resolve abroad, on the other hand, which in turn tend to salvage them.
Trump’s tax plan was released on Wednesday 26 April. A brief outline short on details, it looks a lot like barbecued steaks for the rich and corporate world, and mere droppings to the masses. So far, he is asking for a reduction in the corporate tax from 35% to 15% (without specifying the elimination of any corporate loopholes), a massive break for companies. For individuals, however, the only concrete break specified would be a doubling of the standard individual deduction; but one of the most important current individual deductions –that for state and local taxes paid– would likely be eliminated, effectively neutralising the cut.
One potentially important middle-class benefit could come from a different treatment of small businesses, many proprietors of which must treat their profits as individual income. Trump’s plan would treat such ‘pass through’ companies as corporations, thereby effectively reducing their top marginal income tax rate from 39.5% to the proposed corporate rate of 15%. However, the vague and incomplete plan, when combined with Trump’s spending proposals, so far revenue neutral, would produce a federal deficit of US$1 to US$2 trillion, depending how much of a boost to growth it would actually generate. All of this must be horse traded and approved by the Congress, and only then will one know where Trump is really heading. The fate of the Exxon petition for its Black Sea exemption from Russian sanctions will be another bell weather of the actual direction in which Trump’s fleets are sailing.
Furthermore, the second try at the American Health Care Act has also recently been announced for this week. All of this comes at the same time the showdown in the Congress over the extension of expiring government appropriations –ie, the immediate funding of the federal state apparatus– is expected to reach
U.S. National Security and Military News Review
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Huffington Post |
Donald Trump Lashes Out At 'Fake News' Media As Journalists Gather In D.C.
Huffington Post President Donald Trump blasted the media as “fake news” and criticized journalists for taking part in the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday. Trump held a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, as several other events took place in ... Donald Trump in Harrisburg to mark his 100th day in officeWashington Times Donald Trump to mark his first 100 days with a rally in PennsylvaniaABC News Rally to protest Donald Trump's climate change stance marks US president's 100th dayNEWS.com.au all 104 news articles » |
Vice President Pence introduced President Trump at a rally to mark their first 100 days in office. Pence touted Trump's foreign policy achievements, saying Trump is standing strong against North Korea, Iran and ISIS.
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CBSN is the first digital streaming news network that will allow Internet-connected consumers to watch live, anchored news coverage on their connected TV and other devices. At launch, the network is available 24/7 and makes all of the resources of CBS News available directly on digital platforms with live, anchored coverage 15 hours each weekday. CBSN. Always On.
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By Alessandro Bruno
The presidents of Libya’s two parliaments met in Rome as part of an Italian sponsored initiative to resume a reunification process. The Speaker of the Tobruk House of Representatives (HoR) parliament from Tobruk, Aghila Saleh, and Abdulrahman Sewehli, the head of the High Council of State in Tripoli. The latter serves as the Parliament of the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA – as part of the December 2015 Skhirat Accord) headed by Prime Minister Fayaz al-Sarraj). Abdulrahman Sewehli seemed optimistic at the end of his April 21st meeting with Italy’s foreign affairs minister Angelino Alfano. Saleh, has who has been president of the HoR since August 2014, has been subject to US and EU sanctions since 2016 for stalling and blocking political progress
The meeting did not produce any formal agreements, but it appears to have improved the prospect of more constructive discussions to resolve “pending” issues in the Libyan crisis. The two representatives agreed to meet again. The fact that Italy’s ambassador to Libya, one of the few EU diplomats in the North African country, also attended the talks, underlines the extent to which Rome wants the parties to reach a solution, such that the GNA might finally achieve a sufficient degree of sovereignty. Italy’s prime minister recently visited Washington, where he discussed Libya to gauge the extent of President Trump’s interest in taking a more active stance – as Obama had done – in backing the GNA and Prime Minister al-Sarraj’s efforts to extend its reach. However, Trump’s enthusiasm in this regard was less than lukewarm.
That leaves Moscow. The Russians are doubtless interested in reclaiming a role in Libya, perhaps gaining a naval base in Cyrenaica, and extending their influence in the eastern Mediterranean. To that end, Vladimir Putin’s government has kept Marshal Khalifa Haftar and the Tobruk (HoR) close. But, the Russians have also held talks with the HoR’s Tripolitanian rivals to find an acceptable solution to the crisis. For Russia, Libya might serve as a lever for diplomatic leverage. For, the EU and Italy, which endures the largest burden of illegal migration from the Libyan coast, Russia might contribute to a solution.
The Libyan Summit in Rome shows that reconciliation is not impossible
It would be premature – stability is at the ‘toddler’ stage at best – to suggest the Government of National Accord has reached a breakthrough. Libya is still far from even a precarious stability. But, the renewed diplomatic effort to resolve the GNA puzzle may have a chance of achieving a reasonable facsimile. The Tripoli government, led by Al Sarraj, which is the only one that the UN (and the EU) has formally recognized, remains vulnerable. But, Russia seems ready to return to North Africa, having courted but not formally recognized the Tobruk HoR, elected in 2014. Until last March, when Moscow and Washington appeared to have found a common language, General Haftar was counting on a double ‘whammy’ of support from Trump and Putin.
Gen. Haftar fought Islamic State in Cyrenaica, also using his small air force to attack the Islamic militants in Sirte and Misrata. Haftar himself enjoys direct backing from President al-Sisi of Egypt as well as the United Arab Emirates, and does not recognize the authority of the government of national unity established in Tripoli. Yet, as of April 6, when Trump launched Tomahawk missiles against a Syrian air base in response to the al-Assad government’s alleged use of chemical weapons, it seems something got lost in translation between the White House and the Kremlin. As for al-Sarraj’s government, it has never been able to impose its authority on the capital, where at least a dozen militias remain active and alliances and areas of influence shift continuously. Fayez Al Serraj remains a weak prime minister of a government that has not established its rule. From a practical point of view, Serraj’s government, even after the Rome meeting, has yet to secure political legitimacy from the House of Representatives (HoR) in Tobruk.
In this scenario, Aghila Saleh and Haftar might be persuaded to come to terms with the GNA. Both fear that with the legitimation of Serraj, their roles, without American backing, are destined to carry less international weight. Now the UN-sponsored government administers some three quarters of Libya’s territory on paper. That is all of Libya except for Cyrenaica where the ‘unrecognized’ HoR is based. Moreover, Serraj has secured the support of three key institutions: The National Oil Company (NOC), the Central Bank and the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA). These are remnants of the Qadhafi regime and they control the clear majority of Libya’s assets. LIA managed some $70 billion euros, which during the time of Qadhafi, Libya invested virtually all over the world. That money is still being withheld, but would be released once stability is achieved. The funds, oil revenue, and the Central Bank’s coffers, will all be used to pay for reconstruction.
Haftar and Saleh wanted to create an alternative LIA and even another NOC in Cyrenaica, but oil production is too weak to support these projects. Thus, The Tobruk government had little choice but to try to reach a compromise with Tripoli. As much as Haftar can count on Russian and other international support for his efforts to combat Islamic State, Moscow cannot play all its cards on a Libyan bet. Still, Haftar and Saleh might yet secure some lofty roles within the GNA if they play along.
The Libyan summit in Rome is significant because it’s the first ever meeting between the Tripoli and Tobruk rival authorities. The Italian government, meanwhile, appears to have taken a responsibility to fulfill the Libyan political agreement. The two sides agreed on achieving a peaceful and fair solution to issues focused on the country’s interests, national reconciliation, and the repatriation of all Libyan refugees and displaced persons. Tripoli and Tobruk can now begin consultations to amend the GNA agreement to help resolve the Libyan stalemate, including the role that General Haftar will play. The Rome ‘Libyan’ summit could also serve as the platform for a more important meeting as early as this summer between Sarraj and Haftar in Washington, with President Trump. That meeting could settle a reconciliation between the two Libyan leaders. Europe fears the Libyan refugee ‘bomb.’ The country, as it stands now, faces a constant risk of implosion. Collapse would mean an exponential rise in the already dramatic migration phenomenon.
Washington’s absence in Libya is an opportunity for Moscow
While Trump may appreciate the glory of playing intermediary in a Tobruk-Tripoli reconciliation, he doesn’t want to put any effort into attaining it. He will let the EU handle it, and give American assent when everything is ready. Trump does not see a US role in resolving the Libyan crisis. Italy’s PM, Paolo Gentiloni, tried to draw some American attention to the problem of security in the Mediterranean during his visit to Washington. But he came back empty-handed. The White House no longer cares about the Libyan problem, which the U.S. itself helped to trigger with its 2011 NATO intervention. For Trump, Libya is Obama’s and, especially, Hillary’s problem. The possibility that jihadist militias might grow stronger was, incidentally, one of the arguments that Gentiloni discussed with Trump to persuade the president not to ignore the Libya file. Trump confirmed that if the threat were to come back, he would not hesitate to intervene. But, the task of shaping a political solution to the crisis would be left to the EU and Italy. Perhaps at the forthcoming May 2017 G7 Summit in Taormina Italy, Italy’s PM might try to persuade Trump to intervene, noting that Russia is backing Haftar. He might wish, in passing, to mention that it might not be in Washington’s interest to allow Putin to grab more influence in the Mediterranean.
As recently revealed by The Guardian, even a top candidate for the role of US Special Envoy to Libya, Sebastian Gorka, urged the partition of Libya into three, on the basis of the Ottoman-era administrative divisions of Cyrenaica, Fezzan, and Tripolitania. The EU would find that hard to accept, given all the efforts in trying to keep Libya whole such as to better control the migration problem. Migrant landings in Italy are incessant and continue to rise, marking a 40% increase compared to 2016. But, Haftar seems the only one capable of suppressing the Islamist wave. As for Moscow, Haftar’s ally (the Libyan General even speaks Russian), it might be the better capital for the Italian PM to visit to secure more support in mediating the Libyan crisis. Al-Serraj’s visit to Russia on March 2 certainly suggests the Kremlin is keeping all options open in Libya, especially the idea of a unity government. Putin would work with Italy in that regard and get some concessions on sanctions and Ukraine in return. Italy has this one chance. It should mediate an intra-Libyan agreement with Moscow. It should be noted that Russia has also held bilateral talks with Algeria, which has a strong influence in Libya, on security issues.
This article was published at Geopolitical Monitor.com
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At a rally of his supporters in Harrisburg, Pa., Trump railed against the "fake news" media. Trump called out the White House Correspondents Dinner, saying " a large group of Hollywood actors and Washington media are consoling each other in a hotel ballroom in our nation's capital right now."
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CBSN is the first digital streaming news network that will allow Internet-connected consumers to watch live, anchored news coverage on their connected TV and other devices. At launch, the network is available 24/7 and makes all of the resources of CBS News available directly on digital platforms with live, anchored coverage 15 hours each weekday. CBSN. Always On.
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Just before the May holidays, Russia’s state statistical agency released figures on births, deaths and marriages that Moscow may hope no one will notice because they are so bad; but Russian economists have sounded the alarm that the population decline they point to may make impossible for the Russian economy to grow in the future.
The number of children born in Russia during the first quarter of 2017 was 412,000, down from 458,000 in the same period a year earlier for a decline of 10 percent. And although mortality fell by one percent, the number of deaths exceeded the number of births by 76,000 or 19 percent (nakanune.ru/news/2017/4/29/22468618/).
This pattern was observed throughout the country. Indeed, in contrast to the past where Muslim regions showed higher numbers of births relative to deaths than elsewhere, in the first quarter just completed, there was only a single federal subject where that was true, Rosstat says, the Chukchi Autonomous District.
Other bad demographic news included an increase in the number of divorces compared to the number of marriages. During the first quarter, there were 84 divorces for every 100 marriages, a pattern that almost guarantees that “in 2017, a loss of population will again be renewed in Russia.”
On Thursday, Maksim Topilin, the labor minister, told Vladimir Putin that the situation reflects declines in the size of the prime child-bearing age cohort among women, a decline that he projects will continue. Now, there are just over 22 million women aged 20 to 39; in 2025, there will be only 15 to 16 million.
But there is even worse news, Topilin continued, Russian women are again deciding to have fewer children. To reproduce the population, they need to have “no fewer than 2.1” per woman. In 2015, the maternal capital program and other incentives succeeded in raising the number to 1.78, but in this year, it has again fallen to 1.65.
That means Russia will have not only fewer children but fewer working age adults to support an aging population. Former finance minister Aleksey Kudrin projects a decline in the number of working-age Russians to be 10 million 15 years from now (nakanune.ru/articles/112806).
The only way to compensate for these demographic trends, experts say, is to boost fertility rates, extend life expectancy, or accept a massive influx of immigrants from Central Asia. The first has proved very difficult to do, the second is undercut by Putin’s health “optimization” cutbacks, and the third is opposed by a majority of Russians.
Either Moscow will have to change course radically, or Russia’s demographic decline, which Putin has claimed to have stopped, will not only return but accelerate as each succeeding generation has fewer potential mothers and each mother chooses to have fewer and fewer children.
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CBS News |
Watch live: President Trump's rally speech in Pennsylvania
CBS News Last Updated Apr 29, 2017 9:01 PM EDT. President Donald Trump speaks at a "BIG rally" in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania at 7:30 p.m. EST Saturday, on his 100th day in office. Announced last week in a tweet, Mr. Trump planned the rally for the same night as ... and more » |
BBC News |
Donald Trump attacks US media at 100-day Pennsylvania rally
BBC News US President Donald Trump has launched a scathing attack on the media during a rally marking 100 days in office. He told supporters in Pennsylvania that he was keeping "one promise after another", dismissing criticism as "fake news" by "out of touch" ... and more » |
Trump says the U.S. is imposing immigration control like "never seen before." Trump said "we will build the wall," and then railed against the MS-13 gang.
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CBSN is the first digital streaming news network that will allow Internet-connected consumers to watch live, anchored news coverage on their connected TV and other devices. At launch, the network is available 24/7 and makes all of the resources of CBS News available directly on digital platforms with live, anchored coverage 15 hours each weekday. CBSN. Always On.
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Published on Apr 29, 2017
Trump brought back one of this campaign trail favorites, a poem called "The Snake." The poem tells the story of a woman who takes in a snake, who ends up biting her and telling her "you knew damn well I was a snake before you let me in."
Trump brought back one of this campaign trail favorites, a poem called "The Snake." The poem tells the story of a woman who takes in a snake, who ends up biting her and telling her "you knew damn well I was a snake before you let me in."
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CBSN is the first digital streaming news network that will allow Internet-connected consumers to watch live, anchored news coverage on their connected TV and other devices. At launch, the network is available 24/7 and makes all of the resources of CBS News available directly on digital platforms with live, anchored coverage 15 hours each weekday. CBSN. Always On.
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On Trump's 100th day in office, he spoke to his supporters in a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. CBS News' Chip Reid says it was "like déjà vu all over again."
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FRANCE 24 |
Russian police detain dozens of anti-Putin protesters
FRANCE 24 Police detained over 100 activists in Saint Petersburg on Saturday as hundreds of Russianopposition supporters turned out to protest against President Vladimir Putin's expected candidacy in elections next year. Protests in several cities were called ... and more » |
Voice of America: Crash of Cuban Military Plane Kills 8by webdesk@voanews.com (VOA News)
Eight troops were killed Saturday when a Cuban military plane crashed, a statement from the military said. The Soviet-made AN-26 aircraft took off from Playa Baracoa airport near Havana early Saturday and crashed into a hillside near Candelaria, in Artemisa province, about 65 kilometers southwest of the capital, the statement said. No other information was released.
Voice of America
The Hill |
Investments in Russia become focus in congressional race
FOX19 HELENA, Mont. (AP) - Financial disclosure statements filed by a Montana Republican in his bid for Congress show $240,000 in investments in index funds with substantial holdings in Russianfirms under sanctions by the U.S. government. The sanctions were ... Report: Montana GOP candidate has financial links to Russian firms sanctioned by USThe Hill GOP candidate has financial ties to US-sanctioned Russian companiesThe Guardian GOP candidate has financial ties to Russian companies sanctioned by the US governmentThinkProgress all 73 news articles » |
Voice of America: For Russia and US, Uneasy Cooperation on Cybercrime Is Now a Messby webdesk@voanews.com (Mike Eckel)
Agents from the FBI and the U.S. Secret Service showed up in Moscow in May 2009 with a specific mission: to nab one of the world's most notorious hackers. But to do that, the Americans needed Russia's help. They turned to the Federal Security Service (FSB), the country's main intelligence agency, and shared operational information with officers from its computer-crimes unit, the Center for Information Security. The hacker, Roman Seleznyov, shut down his operations a month later in a move prompted, the U.S. believes, by a leak from the FSB. The credit-card fraudster, it turns out, had bragged in conversations intercepted a year earlier about his protection from the computer-crimes unit. US court The incident, detailed in the legal filings that resulted in a U.S. federal court recently sentencing Seleznyov to 27 years in prison, exposes an unintended consequence of Washington's cybercrime cooperation with Russia: the United States finds itself indicting some of the top-level Russian security officials it worked with. At least one of those officials is a former hacker who worked with the FSB -- an agency accused of involvement in the hacking of U.S. political parties' computers in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Adding to the confusion is the fact that one of those very FSB officers has himself been charged in Russia with high treason. In short, the Russians were recruiting hackers while the Americans sought to work with the FSB to thwart cybercriminals. Now the Americans are indicting -- and in Seleznyov's case, sentencing -- hackers tied in some way to the FSB. The Russians, meanwhile, are charging some of those same individuals with treason. "Russia sees those who cooperated as traitors," explained Pavel Vrublevsky, a prominent e-payment entrepreneur who was imprisoned in Russia for ordering a cyberattack against a competitor. "Now America sees the very same people as cybercriminals themselves." Seleznyov is not the first Russian to have been caught up in a widening U.S. dragnet that has snagged cybercriminals from around the world. Others include Aleksandr Panin, convicted in a federal court in Atlanta in 2016 for creating a computer program that infected millions of computers and drained bank accounts in multiple countries. WATCH: Czech Police Arrest Yevgeny Nikulin In Prague There's also Yevgeny Nikulin, who has sat in a Czech jail following his October arrest while Moscow and Washington both fight for his extradition. And the same day that Seleznyov was sentenced, U.S. prosecutors announced the indictment of another Russian, Pyotr Levashov, arrested in Spain, accusing him of masterminding a "bot net" of infected computers to steal money from bank accounts. Seleznyov, the son of a Russian lawmaker, raked in $170 million selling stolen credit-card information online beginning in 2007, according to U.S. officials. By 2009, his operation was one of the largest providers of such stolen data in the world. The determination that Seleznyov was behind the scheme was what led U.S. investigators to seek the FSB's help in 2009, according to material submitted by prosecutors in a U.S. federal court. In Moscow, they met with officials from the agency's Center for Information Security, including deputy chief Sergei Mikhailov and his subordinate, Dmitry Dokuchayev, current and former U.S. officials with knowledge of the case told RFE/RL. Unfortunately for the Americans, news of the meetings apparently leaked. Seleznyov shut down his so-called carding operations a month later. As U.S. prosecutors noted in court documents, Seleznyov had been recorded telling a colleague in 2008 that he had "obtained protection through the law-enforcement contacts in the computer-crimes squad of the FSB." Seleznyov eventually resurfaced using a different alias, but was indicted by a federal grand jury in 2011 and arrested by U.S. agents while vacationing in the Maldives in 2014. A federal jury convicted him on 38 counts in 2016, and he was sentenced on April 21 to 27 years in prison. "Never before has a criminal engaged in computer fraud of this magnitude been identified, captured, and convicted by an American jury," prosecutors wrote in their court filings. In from the cold The 2009 Moscow discussion was just one of many between U.S. and Russian officials as they sought to work together in investigating international computer crimes. The effort was largely ad hoc, and U.S. officials sought over the following years to a build a more formal arrangement, according to David Hickton, a former U.S. prosecutor involved in several high-profile criminal investigations of alleged Russian hackers. They include the 2014 indictment of Yevgeny Bogachev, who is accused by the FBI of helping to build a network of infected computers around the world using software known as GameOver ZeuS, and using it to steal money from online bank accounts. Competing legal systems, differences of opinion, and distrust proved to be formidable obstacles to cooperation. "They tried to develop a dialogue that would lead to cybernorms and some understanding of [what the] rules of the road would be and how we would navigate our adversarial relationship," Hickton said of the Russians. "And that broke down." Luke Dembosky, who was the resident legal adviser for the Justice Department in Moscow between 2010 and 2013, told RFE/RL that "it was never easy working these kinds of cases with Russia. There were different systems, different laws, different interests." To really make an international cybercase work, Dembosky explained, "you need some alignment of interests and political will, and you need some commonality of law and capabilities." More than anything, he said, "you need some modicum of trust." A troubled relationship As U.S.-Russian cooperation stumbled, the FSB's computer-crimes unit was growing in clout and notoriety, thanks in part to one officer's previous work as a hacker. Dokuchayev, with whom the Americans met with during their 2009 meetings in Moscow, was once well-known in cybercircles under the nickname Forb. He worked with other FSB officers, including one named Igor Sushchin, to recruit hackers to cooperate with the Russian agency on cyberactivities. Among the recruits was Aleksei Belan, who has been wanted by the FBI since 2012 for alleged hacking and computer fraud. Officials from the FSB's Center for Information Security were also involved in the investigation of IT entrepreneur Vrublevsky, the founder of a successful online payment system called ChronoPay. He was convicted in 2013 of orchestrating an attack on a ticketing system used by the airline Aeroflot. Mikhailov, Dokuchayev's superior in the computer-crimes unit, testified against Vrublevsky during the trial. U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that the hackers who broke into email accounts and computer servers belonging to the Democratic and Republican parties during last year's election campaign did so with authorization from top-level Russian officials. The declassified summary of a report released on behalf of the intelligence community in January pointed the finger at the FSB's security rival, the military intelligence agency known as GRU. There was no mention of the FSB, or its computer-crimes unit. But the previous month, then-President Barack Obama announced new economic sanctions and other punitive measures in response to alleged Russian hacking during the U.S. election campaign. The list of those targeted included both the GRU and the FSB, as well as Belan and Bogachev. High treason Just prior to Obama's announcement, Russian security officials moved to arrest FSB computer-crimes unit officers Mikhailov and Dokuchayev. That news became public when the Russian newspapers Kommersant and Novaya Gazeta reported in January that the two had been charged with high treason for giving classified information to Western intelligence, including possibly the CIA. In a dramatic twist, according to Kommersant, Mikhailov was detained during an FSB meeting and taken from the room with a bag over his head. There has been no comment on Mikhailov's or Dokuchayev's arrests from the FSB or Russian prosecutors; the only confirmation of their incarceration came from the lawyer for another computer expert also caught up in the arrests. The U.S. Justice Department did not respond to a phone message or e-mail seeking comment. In March, Dokuchayev's name surfaced again when the U.S. Justice Department announced his indictment, and that of FSB officer Sushchin, in connection with the massive data breach at the Internet company Yahoo. Mikhailov's name does not appear in the indictments, although cyberexperts believe someone identified only as "FSB Officer 3" is, in fact, Mikhailov. Sushchin, according to the indictment, worked as an undercover officer at the investment bank Renaissance Capital. That indictment also named Belan, who U.S. officials said could have been arrested by the FSB at the behest of the FBI any time after being named a top wanted cybercriminal in 2012. Instead, "the FSB officers used him," according to the indictment. "They also provided him with sensitive FSB law-enforcement and intelligence information that would have helped him avoid detection by law enforcement, including information regarding FSB investigations of computer hacking and FSB techniques for identifying criminal hackers." Gray zone First and foremost, the arrests and criminal charges in both Russia and the United States highlight what experts say is the blurry line between Russian law-enforcement and security agencies and criminal networks, in cybercrime or otherwise. "Moscow still depends, to a considerable extent, on recruiting cybercriminals, or simply calling on them from time to time, in return for their continued freedom," Mark Galeotti, a Prague-based expert on Russian intelligence agencies, wrote in a report published on April 18. It's a gray zone that poses substantial danger for Russia itself, according to one of the other Russians charged with treason stemming from the December arrests: Ruslan Stoyanov, a former Interior Ministry investigator. In a letter published by the Dozhd TV channel, Stoyanov, who worked for the Moscow-based computer security company Kaspersky Lab, warned that cooperating with cybercriminals would only embolden them. "The worst scenario would be to give cybercriminals immunity from punishment for stealing money in other countries in exchange for intelligence. If this happens, an entire layer of 'patriotic thieves' will appear, violating the principles of the rule of law and the inevitability of punishment," he wrote. "We will see a new wave of crime in Russia." Former U.S. prosecutor Hickton, who now heads the University of Pittsburgh Institute for Cyber Law, Policy and Security, said Russia could have easily arrested Bogachev after he was indicted in 2014 but there is no extradition treaty between the two countries. Moreover, according to the research firm Fox-IT, the infected computers believed to have been used by Bogachev were also allegedly used to search for information about top-secret government files in places such as Ukraine, Georgia, and Turkey. That suggests the involvement of someone who was more than a mere criminal hacker -- perhaps an operative working on behalf of an intelligence agency. But the arrests also represent another facet of the collapsed relationship between Moscow and Washington. Hickton said the Bogachev indictment may have been one factor in why U.S.-Russian cooperation in cybercrimes deteriorated. Or it may have merely been a casualty of other points of conflict between Washington and Moscow, such as Russia's seizure of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula and support for separatists in Ukraine's east. "This all -- this all is a mess," Vrublevsky told RFE/RL. "And it's a mess to be dealt with in both countries. The sooner the better."
Voice of America
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This article first appeared at Consortium News 10 days ago, but it has been passed around a lot, and Consortium News gave us permission to republish. –Ed.
The other day, I asked a longtime Democratic Party insider who is working on the Russia-gate investigation which country interfered more in U.S. politics, Russia or Israel. Without a moment’s hesitation, he replied, “Israel, of course.”
Which underscores my concern about the hysteria raging across Official Washington about “Russian meddling” in the 2016 presidential campaign: There is no proportionality applied to the question of foreign interference in U.S. politics. If there were, we would have a far more substantive investigation of Israel-gate.
The problem is that if anyone mentions the truth about Israel’s clout, the person is immediately smeared as “anti-Semitic” and targeted by Israel’s extraordinarily sophisticated lobby and its many media/political allies for vilification and marginalization.
So, the open secret of Israeli influence is studiously ignored, even as presidential candidates prostrate themselves before the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both appeared before AIPAC in 2016, with Clinton promising to take the U.S.-Israeli relationship “to the next level” – whatever that meant – and Trump vowing not to “pander” and then pandering like crazy.
Congress is no different. It has given Israel’s controversial Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a record-tying three invitations to address joint sessions of Congress (matching the number of times British Prime Minister Winston Churchill appeared). We then witnessed the Republicans and Democrats competing to see how often their members could bounce up and down and who could cheer Netanyahu the loudest, even when the Israeli prime minister was instructing the Congress to follow his position on Iran rather than President Obama’s.
Israeli officials and AIPAC also coordinate their strategies to maximize political influence, which is derived in large part by who gets the lobby’s largesse and who doesn’t. On the rare occasion when members of Congress step out of line – and take a stand that offends Israeli leaders – they can expect a well-funded opponent in their next race, a tactic that dates back decades.
Well-respected members, such as Rep. Paul Findley and Sen. Charles Percy (both Republicans from Illinois), were early victims of the Israeli lobby’s wrath when they opened channels of communication with the Palestine Liberation Organization in the cause of seeking peace. Findley was targeted and defeated in 1982; Percy in 1984.
Findley recounted his experience in a 1985 book, They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby, in which Findley called the lobby “the 700-pound gorilla in Washington.” The book was harshly criticized in a New York Times review by Adam Clymer, who called it “an angry, one-sided book that seems often to be little more than a stringing together of stray incidents.”
Enforced Silence
Since then, there have been fewer and fewer members of Congress or other American politicians who have dared to speak out, judging that – when it comes to the Israeli lobby – discretion is the better part of valor. Today, many U.S. pols grovel before the Israeli government seeking a sign of favor from Prime Minister Netanyahu, almost like Medieval kings courting the blessings of the Pope at the Vatican.
During the 2008 campaign, then-Sen. Barack Obama, whom Netanyahu viewed with suspicion, traveled to Israel to demonstrate sympathy for Israelis within rocket-range of Gaza while steering clear of showing much empathy for the Palestinians.
In 2012, Republican nominee Mitt Romney tried to exploit the tense Obama-Netanyahu relationship by stopping in Israel to win a tacit endorsement from Netanyahu. The 2016 campaign was no exception with both Clinton and Trump stressing their love of Israel in their appearances before AIPAC.
Money, of course, has become the lifeblood of American politics – and American supporters of Israel have been particularly strategic in how they have exploited that reality.
One of Israel’s most devoted advocates, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, has poured millions of dollars in “dark money” into political candidates and groups that support Israel’s interests. Adelson, who has advocated dropping a nuclear bomb inside Iran to coerce its government, is a Trump favorite having donated a record $5 million to Trump’s inaugural celebration.
Of course, many Israel-connected political donations are much smaller but no less influential. A quarter century ago, I was told how an aide to a Democratic foreign policy chairman, who faced a surprisingly tough race after redistricting, turned to the head of AIPAC for help and, almost overnight, donations were pouring in from all over the country. The chairman was most thankful.
The October Surprise Mystery
Israel’s involvement in U.S. politics also can be covert. For instance, the evidence is now overwhelming that the Israeli government of right-wing Prime Minister Menachem Begin played a key role in helping Ronald Reagan’s campaign in 1980 strike a deal with Iran to frustrate President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to free 52 American hostages before Election Day.
Begin despised Carter for the Camp David Accords that forced Israel to give back the Sinai to Egypt. Begin also believed that Carter was too sympathetic to the Palestinians and – if he won a second term – would conspire with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to impose a two-state solution on Israel.
Begin’s contempt for Carter was not even a secret. In a 1991 book, The Last Option, senior Israeli intelligence and foreign policy official David Kimche explained Begin’s motive for dreading Carter’s reelection. Kimche said Israeli officials had gotten wind of “collusion” between Carter and Sadat “to force Israel to abandon her refusal to withdraw from territories occupied in 1967, including Jerusalem, and to agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state.”
Kimche continued, “This plan prepared behind Israel’s back and without her knowledge must rank as a unique attempt in United States’s diplomatic history of short-changing a friend and ally by deceit and manipulation.”
But Begin recognized that the scheme required Carter winning a second term in 1980 when, Kimche wrote, “he would be free to compel Israel to accept a settlement of the Palestinian problem on his and Egyptian terms, without having to fear the backlash of the American Jewish lobby.”
In a 1992 memoir, Profits of War, former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe also noted that Begin and other Likud leaders held Carter in contempt.
“Begin loathed Carter for the peace agreement forced upon him at Camp David,” Ben-Menashe wrote. “As Begin saw it, the agreement took away Sinai from Israel, did not create a comprehensive peace, and left the Palestinian issue hanging on Israel’s back.”
So, in order to buy time for Israel to “change the facts on the ground” by moving Jewish settlers into the West Bank, Begin felt Carter’s reelection had to be prevented. A different president also presumably would give Israel a freer hand to deal with problems on its northern border with Lebanon.
Ben-Menashe was among a couple of dozen government officials and intelligence operatives who described how Reagan’s campaign, mostly through future CIA Director William Casey and past CIA Director George H.W. Bush, struck a deal in 1980 with senior Iranians who got promises of arms via Israel in exchange for keeping the hostages through the election and thus humiliating Carter. (The hostages were finally released on Jan. 20, 1981, after Reagan was sworn in as President.)
Discrediting History
Though the evidence of the so-called October Surprise deal is far stronger than the current case for believing that Russia colluded with the Trump campaign, Official Washington and the mainstream U.S. media have refused to accept it, deeming it a “conspiracy theory.”
One of the reasons for the hostility directed against the 1980 case was the link to Israel, which did not want its hand in manipulating the election of a U.S. president to become an accepted part of American history. So, for instance, the Israeli government went to great lengths to discredit Ben-Menashe after he began to speak with reporters and to give testimony to the U.S. Congress.
When I was a Newsweek correspondent and first interviewed Ben-Menashe in 1990, the Israeli government initially insisted that he was an impostor, that he had no connection to Israeli intelligence.
However, when I obtained documentary evidence of Ben-Menashe’s work for a military intelligence unit, the Israelis admitted that they had lied but then insisted that he was just a low-level translator, a claim that was further contradicted by other documents showing that he had traveled widely around the world on missions to obtain weapons for the Israel-to-Iran arms pipeline.
Nevertheless, the Israeli government along with sympathetic American reporters and members of the U.S. Congress managed to shut down any serious investigation into the 1980 operation, which was, in effect, the prequel to Reagan’s Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal of 1984-86. Thus, U.S. history was miswritten. [For more details, see Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative; Secrecy & Privilege; and Trick or Treason.]
Looking back over the history of U.S.-Israeli relations, it is clear that Israel exercised significant influence over U.S. presidents since its founding in 1948, but the rise of Israel’s right-wing Likud Party in the 1970s – led by former Jewish terrorists Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir – marked a time when Israel shed any inhibitions about interfering directly in U.S. politics.
Much as Begin and Shamir engaged in terror attacks on British officials and Palestinian civilians during Israel’s founding era, the Likudniks who held power in 1980 believed that the Zionist cause trumped normal restraints on their actions. In other words, the ends justified the means.
In the 1980s, Israel also mounted spying operations aimed at the U.S. government, including those of intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard, who fed highly sensitive documents to Israel and – after being caught and spending almost three decades in prison – was paroled and welcomed as a hero inside Israel.
A History of Interference
But it is true that foreign interference in U.S. politics is as old as the American Republic. In the 1790s, French agents – working with the Jeffersonians – tried to rally Americans behind France’s cause in its conflict with Great Britain. In part to frustrate the French operation, the Federalists passed the Alien and Sedition Acts.
In the Twentieth Century, Great Britain undertook covert influence operations to ensure U.S. support in its conflicts with Germany, while German agents unsuccessfully sought the opposite.
So, the attempts by erstwhile allies and sometimes adversaries to move U.S. foreign policy in one direction or another is nothing new, and the U.S. government engages in similar operations in countries all over the world, both overtly and covertly.
It was the CIA’s job for decades to use propaganda and dirty tricks to ensure that pro-U.S. politicians were elected or put in power in Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa, pretty much everywhere the U.S. government perceived some interest. After the U.S. intelligence scandals of the 1970s, however, some of that responsibility was passed to other organizations, such as the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
NED, USAID and various “non-governmental organizations” (NGOs) finance activists, journalists and other operatives to undermine political leaders who are deemed to be obstacles to U.S. foreign policy desires.
In particular, NED has been at the center of efforts to flip elections to U.S.-backed candidates, such as in Nicaragua in 1990, or to sponsor “color revolutions,” which typically organize around some color as the symbol for mass demonstrations. Ukraine – on Russia’s border – has been the target of two such operations, the Orange Revolution in 2004, which helped install anti-Russian President Viktor Yushchenko, and the Maidan ouster of elected pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.
NED president Carl Gershman, a neoconservative who has run NED since its founding in 1983, openly declared that Ukraine was “the biggest prize” in September 2013 — just months before the Maidan protests — as well as calling it an important step toward ousting Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2016, Gershman called directly for regime change in Russia.
The Neoconservatives
Another key issue related to Israeli influence inside the United States is the role of the neocons, a political movement that emerged in the 1970s as a number of hawkish Democrats migrated to the Republican Party as a home for more aggressive policies to protect Israel and take on the Soviet Union and Arab states.
In some European circles, the neocons are described as “Israel’s American agents,” which may somewhat overstate the direct linkage between Israel and the neocons although a central tenet of neocon thinking is that there must be no daylight between the U.S. and Israel. The neocons say U.S. politicians must stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel even if that means the Americans sidling up to the Israelis rather than any movement the other way.
Since the mid-1990s, American neocons have worked closely with Benjamin Netanyahu. Several prominent neocons (including former Assistant Defense Secretary Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, Meyrav Wurmser and Robert Loewenberg) advised Netanyahu’s 1996 campaign and urged a new strategy for “securing the realm.” Essentially, the idea was to replace negotiations with the Palestinians and Arab states with “regime change” for governments that were viewed as troublesome to Israel, including Iraq and Syria.
By 1998, the Project for the New American Century (led by neocons William Kristol and Robert Kagan) was pressuring President Bill Clinton to invade Iraq, a plan that was finally put in motion in 2003 under President George W. Bush.
But the follow-on plans to go after Syria and Iran were delayed because the Iraq War turned into a bloody mess, killing some 4,500 American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Bush could not turn to phase two until near the end of his presidency and then was frustrated by a U.S. intelligence estimate concluding that Iran was not working on a nuclear bomb (which was to be the pretext for a bombing campaign).
Bush also could pursue “regime change” in Syria only as a proxy effort of subversion, rather than a full-scale U.S. invasion. President Barack Obama escalated the Syrian proxy war in 2011 with the support of Israel and its strange-bedfellow allies in Saudi Arabia and the other Sunni-ruled Gulf States, which hated Syria’s government because it was allied with Shiite-ruled Iran — and Sunnis and Shiites have been enemies since the Seventh Century. Israel insists that the U.S. take the Sunni side, even if that puts the U.S. in bed with Al Qaeda.
But Obama dragged his heels on a larger U.S. military intervention in Syria and angered Netanyahu further by negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program rather than bomb-bomb-bombing Iran.
Showing the Love
Obama’s perceived half-hearted commitment to Israeli interests explained Romney’s campaign 2012 trip to seek Netanyahu’s blessings. Even after winning a second term, Obama sought to appease Netanyahu by undertaking a three-day trip to Israel in 2013 to show his love.
Still, in 2015, when Obama pressed ahead with the Iran nuclear agreement, Netanyahu went over the President’s head directly to Congress where he was warmly received, although the Israeli prime minister ultimately failed to sink the Iran deal.
In Campaign 2016, both Clinton and Trump wore their love for Israel on their sleeves, Clinton promising to take the relationship to “the next level” (a phrase that young couples often use when deciding to go from heavy petting to intercourse). Trump reminded AIPAC that he had a Jewish grandchild and vowed to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Both also bristled with hatred toward Iran, repeating the popular falsehood that “Iran is the principal source of terrorism” when it is Saudi Arabia and other Sunni sheikdoms that have been the financial and military supporters of Al Qaeda and Islamic State, the terror groups most threatening to Europe and the United States.
By contrast to Israel’s long history of playing games with U.S. politics, the Russian government stands accused of trying to undermine the U.S. political process recently by hacking into emails of the Democratic National Committee — revealing the DNC’s improper opposition to Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaign — and of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta — disclosing the contents of Clinton’s paid speeches to Wall Street and pay-to-play aspects of the Clinton Foundation — and sharing that information with the American people via WikiLeaks.
Although WikiLeaks denies getting the two batches of emails from the Russians, the U.S. intelligence community says it has high confidence in its conclusions about Russian meddling and the mainstream U.S. media treats the allegations as flat-fact.
The U.S. intelligence community also has accused the Russian government of raising doubts in the minds of Americans about their political system by having RT, the Russian-sponsored news network, hold debates for third-party candidates (who were excluded from the two-party Republican-Democratic debates) and by having RT report on protests such as Occupy Wall Street and issues such as “fracking.”
The major U.S. news media and Congress seem to agree that the only remaining question is whether evidence can be adduced showing that the Trump campaign colluded in this Russian operation. For that purpose, a number of people associated with the Trump campaign are to be hauled before Congress and made to testify on whether or not they are Russian agents.
Meanwhile, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other establishment-approved outlets are working with major technology companies on how to marginalize independent news sources and to purge “Russian propaganda” (often conflated with “fake news”) from the Internet.
It seems that no extreme is too extreme to protect the American people from the insidious Russians and their Russia-gate schemes to sow doubt about the U.S. political process. But God forbid if anyone were to suggest an investigation of Israel-gate.
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Carl Bernstein: Flynn is 'central to what the FBI believes is cover-up'
The Hill (blog) - Apr 26, 2017
... .@carlbernstein: It's obvious Gen. Flynn is up to his neck ... He's central to what the FBI believes is a cover up <a href="https://t.co/T1xxdWIXXK" rel="nofollow">https://t.co/T1xxdWIXXK</a>. — New Day (@NewDay) April 26, 2017. CNN commentator Carl Bernstein suggested Wednesday that former national ...
Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein on Trump-Russia investigation: 'Oh my god, there's a cover-up going on'
The Independent - Apr 26, 2017
Famed Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein says that the investigation into former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn could end up revealing a “cover-up” of alleged connections between President Donald Trump's team and Russia. “There, he is central ...
Carl Bernstein: Trump 'Impeding' Russia Investigations By Not Handing Over Flynn Docs
Mediaite - Apr 26, 2017
... .@carlbernstein: It's obvious Gen. Flynn is up to his neck … He's central to what the FBI believes is a cover up <a href="https://t.co/T1xxdWIXXK" rel="nofollow">https://t.co/T1xxdWIXXK</a>. — New Day (@NewDay) April 26, 2017. According to a renowned journalist who was a key figure in helping to ...
'Oh my god, there's a cover-up going on': Carl Bernstein accuses Trump of 'impeding' Russia probe
Raw Story - Apr 26, 2017
Legendary journalist Carl Bernstein said Mike Flynn is the key to uncovering the Trump campaign's ties to Russia. “I think it's obvious that Gen. Flynn is in up to his neck in terms, not just of possible crimes involving his speeches and whether or not ...
Trump May Be Saving His Own Skin By Covering Up For Flynn
Carbonated.tv (blog) - Apr 27, 2017
“Flynn is almost like the ball of yarn that begins to unspool and is key to understanding it," explained famous Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein. An error occurred. Try watching this video on <a href="http://www.youtube.com" rel="nofollow">www.youtube.com</a>, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled ...
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The Independent |
Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein on Trump-Russia investigation: 'Oh my god, there's a cover-up going on'
The Independent Famed Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein says that the investigation into former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn could end up revealing a “cover-up” of alleged connections between President Donald Trump's team and Russia. “There, he is central ... Russia Questions Dominate First 100 Days Of Trump's PresidencyWUWM Sally Yates to testify at May 8 Senate hearingCNN all 60 news articles » |
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