This post was published at OpenMind
US Baits ISIS to Stage False-Flag Chemical Attack to Justify Greater US Attack against Syria
What could be smellier and more tempting bait to get ISIS to launch a chemical-weapon attack than a US guarantee that ‘any’ chemical weapon attack in Syria will be automatically blamed on Assad’s regime and will automatically result in the US attacking Assad and all of ISIS’s other enemies?
Today the White House offered ISIS that ironclad guarantee.
White House issues preemptive warning to Syria on chemical attack
Today, the White House issued a carte blanc guarantee to ISIS, pledging that the Assad regime will pay a heavy price for any chemical weapon attack that happens inside of Syria:
The Trump administration issued a rare, preemptive warning to the Syrian regime against launching any chemical weapons attacks, warning Damascus will ‘pay a heavy price’ if it refuses to heed Washington’s red line. (The Washington Times)
The use of the term ‘red line’ makes this more than just another line in the sand because of its historic overtones. Assad and everyone else in the world remembers the political price Obama paid for stating that a chemical weapons attack would be a ‘red line’ for the US that Syria dare not cross. When an attack did happen, which Obama doubted was due to Syria, he refused to cross that line and was criticized for cowardice for years. I think everyone knows that Trump is not about to repeat that kind of retreat from his threat.
This post was published at GoldSeek on Wednesday, 28 June 2017.
Middle East At Point Of No Return As Saudi-Qatar Rift Deepens
Saudi King Salman’s decision to appoint his son Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) as the new crown prince did not come as a surprise. For months, the power struggle between former crown prince Mohammed Bin Nayef (MBN) and MBS happened in plain sight, and a confrontation was imminent. However, King Salman made his own calculations and decided to remove MBN in favor of MBS, providing a continuation of his own family line in the future. Over the last week, the media has been overwhelmed with assessments of the House of Saud and the role MBS will play or has been playing. The family feuds in the House of Saud are notorious, whenever a king dies an internal power struggle will emerge, regardless of what strategies have been implemented before.
At present, the Young Prince of Riyadh, Mohammed Bin Salman, has been given the key to power. This has happened at a very difficult time for not only the Kingdom, but also for the whole Gulf region and its neighbors. The choice made by King Salman to promote his son is a remarkable one but could, from a Saudi perspective, be the only viable choice. The need for a 180 degree change in the economic and social policy which keeps Saudi Arabia a strategic regional player is essential. Without radical changes, such as those presented in Vision 2030 or the Aramco IPO project, the Kingdom’s future could be bleak, as the era for ‘Rentier States’ is over.
The challenges MBS faces are enormous. Due to lower hydrocarbon revenues, he will need to change an oil-based economy into a more open, liberal and high-tech economy, capable of taking on global competition in these fields. By opening up the Kingdom via Vision 2030 and the expected billions of dollars from IPO revenues, this could become a reality, not a fata morgana.
A successful economic transformation and increased participation of Saudi youth (including women) could stabilize the Kingdom in the future. MBS relies on this economic transformation to silence opposition inside the House of Saud, as other princes are vying for the crown. While the Saudi leading ulema have pledged allegiance to the new crown prince, the reality remains complex.
This post was published at Zero Hedge on Jun 28, 2017.
Researchers Discover That Social Media Posts Can Be Used To Predict Riots, Revolutions, And Even The Weather
Most of us don’t give much thought to what we post on social media, and a lot of what we see on social media is pretty innocuous. However, it only seems that way at first glance. The truth is that what we post online has a frightening potential. According to recent research from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the University of Washington, the things we post on social media could be utilized by software to predict future events.
In a paper that’s just been published on Arxiv, the team of researchers found that social media can be used to ‘detect and predict offline events’.
Twitter analysis can accurately predict civil unrest, for instance, because people use certain hashtags to discuss issues online before their anger bubbles over into the real world.
This post was published at shtfplan on June 27th, 2017.
Venezuela’s Maduro Says Armed Group “Started A Coup”, Used Helicopter To Drop Grenades
In an incident that is oddly reminiscent to the “failed coup” in Turkey from last June, late on Tuesday a rogue Venezuelan police helicopter strafed the Supreme Court and the interior ministry on Tuesday, in what President Nicolas Maduro called an attack by “terrorists seeking a coup” and which major news agencies said was an escalation of the OPEC nation’s political crisis, although to some local Venezuelans this was a staged attempt to justify ongoing repression at Venezuela’s National Assembly.
According to Reuters, the helicopter fired 15 shots at the Interior Ministry, where dozens of people were gathered at a social event, after dropping four grenades on the Supreme court during a meeting of judges, although there were no reports of injuries. Opponents to Maduro view the symbolic Interior Ministry as a bastion of repression and also hate the Supreme Court for its string of rulings bolstering the president’s power and undermining the opposition-controlled legislature.
President Nicolas Maduro, speaking on state television after the incident, said people flying a helicopter conducted an ‘armed terrorist attack against the country’s institutions’ and added that “this is the kind of armed escalation I have been denouncing.’
This post was published at Zero Hedge on Jun 28, 2017.
UK COLUMN: Trump’s Chemical Weapons Hoax in Syria, Hackers Strike UK Parliament (Must Be the Russians)
More trouble for Trump and Co. Turns out the alleged ‘Sarin’ chemical attack in Idlib, Syria in April never happened. Looks like someone hacked the UK Parliament, but it’s hard to know who, so Theresa May’s government decided to just blame the Russians. Michael Fallon’s circus roadshow continues as the UK’s flagship ‘state of the art’ aircraft carrier is running on… Windows XP.
This post was published at 21st Century Wire on JUNE 28, 2017.
Jailing Barclays bankers won’t save us from another financial crash — Joris Luyendijk
If you had told people in the City at the height of the financial crash in 2008 that it would take almost nine years for the first top bankers to face prosecution, few would have believed you. If you had then said that this first prosecution would relate to suspected fraud over one bank’s supposed attempt to avoid nationalisation – rather than the crash itself – the bankers involved in the crisis would have laughed in disbelief: surely, they aren’t going to let us get away with that?
But they did: the bankers who played a central role in the worst crash of the postwar era walked away with their fortunes and freedom intact. Even worse, the fundamentals of the system that made it possible were retained intact.
It is feasible that some of the top brass at Barclays will now go to jail for the way they raised billions from Qatar to avoid a government bailout – though the accused deny breaking any laws.
Yet ultimately it is of little consequence how this case plays out. The main outcome of the crash is that the DNA of the system that nearly destroyed the world economy is still there. In 2015 Andrew Haldane, the Bank of England’s financial stability chief, suggested that not even the regulator can know what banks really own and owe because they are still allowed to hide so much off the balance sheet.
It is worth recalling just how close we were to unimaginable disaster after Lehman Brothers failed in September 2008. Since nobody in the sector knew what other banks’ real status, pure panic broke out. The entire global financial system threatened to collapse. As the then president of the European council, Herman Van Rompuy, admitted (years later): ‘We came within millimetres of a total implosion’ – an implosion that would have meant hundreds of millions of people discovering that they had lost access to bank accounts, and that supplies to supermarkets, pharmacies and petrol stations had stopped.
This post was published at The Guardian
Lindsey Graham Asks Very Simple Question About ‘Unmasking’; Massive Evasion Effort Ensues
For months now, Senator Lindsey Graham has been trying to get an answer to a very simple question, namely ‘if his conversations are ‘incidentally’ captured while he’s overseas talking with a foreign leader who’s being surveilled by the U. S. intelligence community and his name is subsequently unmasked, is he, as a United States citizen and/or as a U. S. Senator, legally entitled to know that he’s been unmasked?’
And while the entire world is being distracted by the “Russian meddling” narrative, Graham’s question highlights the single most important issue that should be “top-of-mind” for Americans as it gets to the heart of whether the various intelligence agencies in this country can be transformed into political weapons of mass destruction.
As we pointed out a couple of months ago, the timing of Susan Rice’s requests to unmask conversations conducted by Trump officials that were ‘incidentally collected’, and the subsequent leaking of that information to the press, would seem to highlight the urgent need for clarity on this topic (see “Confirmed: Susan Rice “Unmasked” Trump Team“).
This post was published at Zero Hedge on Jun 27, 2017.
The Firm That Created the Dossier Refuses to Produce Docs to Congress
The clandestine firm that created the false dossier on Trump is refusing to cooperate with Congress. They are refusing to turn over to congress information of not just how the report was crafted, but who paid for it.
The Senate Judiciary Committee threatened now to subpoena the firm, Fusion GPS, after it refused to answer questions and provide records to the panel. They have been ordered to identify who financed the fake dossier, which was circulated during the election and has sparked much of the Russian scandal now engulfing the White House cost untold millions so far in investigations.
This post was published at Armstrong Economics on Jun 28, 2017.
Two Top House Dems Accused Of Ethics Violations
Democrats have been having a rough time lately as the phony Russia collusion narrative crumbles (with a little help from noted fake news purveyor CNN) while some of the party’s most venerated officials are facing allegations of misconduct – be it for colluding with the Clinton campaign (Loretta Lynch) or for allegedly submitting a fraudulent loan application and improperly pressuring a regional lender (Bernie and Jane Sanders).
Add to that list Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.), the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, and Ben Ray Lujn (D-N. M.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) who as the Hill reports are facing possible ethics infractions and will appear before a panel at the recommendation of the Office of Congressional Ethics. The OCE is an independent, bipartisan group that examines ethics complaints and forwards what it considers the most serious cases to the Ethics Committee.
This post was published at Zero Hedge on Jun 27, 2017.
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