[Majorityrights News] KP interview with James Gilmore, former diplomat and insider from first Trump administration Posted by Guessedworker on Sunday, 05 January 2025 00:35.
[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
Posted by DanielS on Monday, 12 December 2016 11:23.
Update: New York Times, “Trump Picks Rex Tillerson, Exxon C.E.O., as Secretary of State”, 12 Dec 2016:
WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump on Monday settled on Rex W. Tillerson, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, to be his secretary of state, dismissing bipartisan concerns that the globe-trotting leader of the energy giant had forged a too-cozy relationship with Vladimir V. Putin, the president of Russia, transition officials said.
Mr. Trump planned to announce the selection on Tuesday morning, finally bringing to an end his public and chaotic deliberations over choosing the nation’s top diplomat — a process that at times veered from rewarding Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of his most loyal supporters, to musing about whether Mitt Romney, one of his most vicious critics, might be forgiven.
Russia’s Prime Minister Putin speaks with Tillerson in Sochi in 2011
President-Elect Trump ‘will name Exxon CEO with close links to Putin as his secretary of state’, snubbing Mitt Romney.”
Trump is expected to name Rex Tillerson as secretary of state.
Exxon Mobil chief emerged on Friday as the leading candidate.
Favored status was revealed as Giuliani withdrew.
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is expected to name the chief executive of Exxon Mobil as the country’s top diplomat, NBC News reported Saturday.
Exxon chief Rex Tillerson emerged on Friday as Trump’s leading candidate for U.S. secretary of state and is expected to meet with him later on Saturday, a transition official told Reuters.
NBC News cited two sources close to the transition team in reporting that Tillerson will be named as secretary of state.
The president-elect had interviewed 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney twice – taking him to a three-Michelin starred dinner on one of those occasions.
Should Tillerson be nominated, his business ties, too, will come under scrutiny. Exxon Mobil has operations in more than 50 countries and boasts that it explores for oil and natural gas on six continents.
In 2011, Exxon Mobil signed a deal with Rosneft, Russia’s largest state-owned oil company, for joint oil exploration and production. Since then, the companies have formed 10 joint ventures for projects in Russia.
In 2013, Russian President Vladimir Putin awarded Tillerson his nation’s Order of Friendship.
‘He has had more interactive time with Vladimir Putin than probably any other American with the exception of Henry Kissinger,’ John Hamre, a deputy defense secretary to Bill Clinton told the Wall Street Journal.
But U.S. sanctions against Russia for its incursion into Crimea cost Exxon Mobil dearly, forcing it to scrap some projects and costing it at least $1 billion in losses. Tillerson has been a vocal critic of the sanctions.
Trump has spoken of wanting warmer relations with Moscow, which has sparked concerns in Congress that he could lift or loosen some of the sanctions on Russia.
Tillerson has been chairman and CEO of Exxon Mobil since 2006. He is expected to retire from the company next year.
Should Tillerson be nominated, climate change could be another divisive issue. The company is under investigation by the New York Attorney General’s Office for allegedly misleading investors, regulators and the public on what it knew about global warming.
Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 08 December 2016 09:10.
Israeli missile attack on the Al-Mezzeh Airport, west of Damascus.
TNO, “Israeli Attack as Aleppo End-Game Nears”, 7 Dec 2016:
Israel has launched another devastating airstrike in Damascus in a desperate attempt to thwart the final defeat of the terrorist “rebels” in the Syrian city of Aleppo.
The latest Israeli attack took place on an airport in Damascus near Syrian President al-Assad’s personal home on Wednesday morning.
The Syrian Arab News Agency reported that the “Israeli enemy launched at 3:00 a.m. Wednesday a number of surface-to-surface missiles from inside the occupied territories to the west of Tall Abu al-Nada (hill) that landed in the surroundings of al-Mezzeh Airport west of Damascus.”
The attack was part of the “desperate attempts of the Israeli enemy to support the terrorist groups and raise their deteriorating morale,” SANA added.
“This attack will only make the Syrian Arab Army even more determined to cut off the hands of the terrorist agents of the Zionist entity, which should be held fully responsible for the repercussions and consequences of these criminal attacks.”
SANA concluded that the attack “came a week after the air force of the Israeli army fired from the Lebanese airspace two missiles on al-Sabboura area in the western countryside of Damascus, in an attempt to divert attention from the successes which the Syrian army has been making against the terrorist organizations.”
The Israeli attack came as Syrian army forces, backed by ground units from Hezbollah and Iran, ousted the ISIS and other U.S., U.K., French and E.U.-backed “rebel” terrorists from Aleppo’s Old City area.
After terrorizing inhabitants of the city for years with torture, and murders of the most demented kind, the terrorists have now played a “humanitarian” card, asking for a five-day “ceasefire” to allegedly allow remaining civilians to be evacuated.
This cynical ploy—clearly aimed at seeking “world sympathy”—is an attempt by the shrinking terrorist forces to shore up their collapsing front line by seeking time to bring up reinforcements.
More than 30,000 civilians had already crossed over into safe areas set up by the Syrian government-held west Aleppo.
Posted by DanielS on Tuesday, 06 December 2016 10:09.
Sun: “Britain to send hundreds of soldiers to Poland to ward off Russian troops, as UK looks to Warsaw as a key Brexit ally”
Prime Minister hoping to cement relations with her Polish counterpart ahead of fraught EU negotiations
BRITAIN will send 150 troops to help protect Poland from Russian aggression as Theresa May looks to secure Warsaw’s backing in Brexit talks.
A summit between the PM and her Polish counterpart Beata Szydlo [was held] in an effort to stand up to bolshie Putin and allay Polish fears about its citizens remaining in the UK after Britain leaves the EU.
Theresa May is trying to cement ties with Polish counterpart Beata Szydlo ahead of Brexit negotiations
The deployment of troops from the Light Dragoons will be based in the northeastern town of Orzysz, just 100km from the key Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, from April.
It is here that Russia is planning to base Nuclear-capable missiles posing a major threat to cities in northern Europe.
While the deployment is small compared to Russia’s vast military, the gesture is intended to be symbolic of the UK’s commitment to her NATO allies and Britain’s ties to Poland.
Theresa May said on Sunday: “We share a clear commitment to take our co-operation to the next level and to firmly establish the UK and Poland as resolute and strategic allies.
“We will never forget the Polish pilots who braved the skies alongside us during World War Two … nor the valuable contribution made by so many Poles in our country today.
“I am determined that Brexit will not weaken our relationship … rather it will serve as a catalyst to strengthen it.”
Deployment of 150 troops will be stationed near the border with Kaliningrad, a key Russian enclave
Brexit-related talks will likely rile EU leaders after Brussels banned member states from formal negotiations with Britain before Article 50 is triggered in March next year
While the British deployment will be small the symbolic gesture is intended to help secure Anglo-Polish ties
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 30 November 2016 15:00.
The Somali shooter at Ohio State had apparently been inspired by neo-liberal propaganda presuming that Muslim incursions and compradors which had been promoted and backed in Burma by right-wing Western sources supposedly had some right to remain there.
Washington Post, “I can’t take it anymore’: Ohio State attacker said abuses of Burma’s Muslims led to ‘boiling point”, 29 Nov 2016:
Participants in a vigil at Jacob’s Porch pray after the attack of Ohio State University, who rammed his car into a crowd of pedestrians and attacked them with a butcher knife.
The Ohio State University student who carried out a knife attack on campus Monday wrote in a Facebook post shortly before the rampage that the abuse of a little-known Muslim community in Burma had driven him to the “boiling point,” writing, “I can’t take it anymore,” CNN reported.
“Seeing my fellow Muslims being tortured, raped and killed in Burma has led to a boiling point,” Abdul Razak Ali Artan allegedly wrote on his Facebook page shortly before Monday’s rampage, where he injured 11 people with a butcher knife before police killed him.
“America! Stop interfering with other countries,” he wrote.
Artan’s Facebook post throws a little-known and long-persecuted Muslim community in western Burma, also known as Myanmar, into the spotlight.
More than 1 million Rohingya Muslims live in Burma, but they have long been denied citizenship and other basic rights, and many from Burma’s Buddhist majority consider them illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. Aung San Suu Kyi — the Nobel laureate leading Burma’s new civilian government — has been criticized for refusing to use the term “Rohingya,” which she says is inflammatory.
In recent weeks, thousands of Rohingya Muslims have been fleeing into the forests and neighboring Bangladesh on the heels of a brutal military crackdown that followed a terrorist attack on police posts Oct. 9, allegedly carried out by Rohingya militants.
Human Rights Watch has alleged that the military has perpetrated a scorched-earth campaign, providing before-and-after satellite images that showed three villages completely burned. The death toll estimates vary, but several dozen have been killed since October, activists say.
Earlier this week, a U.N. refugee agency official, John McKissick, was in the Bangladesh region of Cox’s Bazar — where more than 30,000 people, many of them Rohingya, have fled to — and told the BBC that Burmese troops were “killing men, shooting them, slaughtering children, raping women, burning and looting houses, forcing these people to cross the river” into Bangladesh. He said that the “ultimate goal” of Burma’s government is “ethnic cleansing of the Muslim minority.”
Kosher/ Neo-liberal media jerking the tears and prayers from fellow Abrahamics
Posted by DanielS on Tuesday, 29 November 2016 17:36.
Major western media outlets, The New York Times and Yahoo are misleading the public - they are vilifying Assad as he retakes Aleppo, inducing the misconception that it is Assad that has created the situation that has led to civilian casualties and from which the residents have had to flee.
Whereas Assad (a Left Nationalist) should be applauded for re-taking Aleppo on behalf of Syria and Aleppo natives, a misconception has been created by these Western outlets that casualties have resulted from Assad’s arbitrary aggression and that rather than seeking temporary safety from the fighting, civilians are fleeing Assad.
Rebels prevented some refugees from fleeing
New York Times, “Thousands Flee Aleppo, Syria, as Government Forces Advance”, 28 Nov 2016:
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Thousands of people were sent fleeing for their lives on Monday as rebel fighters lost a large stretch of territory to government forces in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo, in what could prove to be a turning point in the conflict, both militarily and psychologically.
Residents described desperate scenes of people’s being killed by shells as they searched for shelter after their homes came under the heaviest bombardment yet of the nearly five-year civil war. Years of airstrikes and shelling have destroyed entire neighborhoods of the rebel-held half of the divided city, once Syria’s largest and an industrial hub.
At least 4,000 people have fled from the rebel-held eastern districts to the city’s government-controlled western side and have registered with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent in Jibreen, a neighborhood there, Jens Laerke, the spokesman for the United Nations office of humanitarian affairs, said on Monday.
As the rebels absorbed the harshest blow since they seized more than half the city four years ago, it seemed increasingly likely that President Bashar al-Assad would eventually manage to take back all of Aleppo.
That would give the Syrian government control of the country’s five largest cities and most of the more-populous west, leaving the rebel groups that are most focused on fighting Mr. Assad with only the northern province of Idlib and a few isolated pockets in the provinces of Aleppo and Homs and around the capital, Damascus.
Throughout the day, government troops, supported by Iranian-backed militias from Iraq and the militant group Hezbollah, advanced from the east and north into the rebel-held areas of Aleppo. That included Hanano, one of the first areas to fall, in 2012, and Sakhour.
Residents of Aleppo, Syria, told us how they feel when they hear an aircraft overhead. Eastern Aleppo has been under heavy bombardment by Syrian and Russian forces.
Kurdish-led militias were also involved in the fight, advancing from the west, from the Kurdish-controlled neighborhood of Sheikh Maksoud, taking the rebel-held district of Sheikh Fares.
Kurdish militias have staked out areas of de facto autonomy in parts of the country but are not entirely aligned with either the government or the rebels. The state news media and opposition activists have portrayed them in the current fighting in Aleppo, however, as working with the government to fight rebels. The Kurdish militias have clashed previously with rebels in Aleppo, who shelled the Sheikh Maksoud area.
If the government takes back the whole city, large parts of Syria will still remain outside its control, as Kurdish groups and the Islamic State hold most of the eastern half of the country. But it could effectively spell the end of the Syrian insurgent movements that sprang up against Mr. Assad after a crackdown on protests in 2011.
“It’s like doomsday,” said Zaher al-Zaher, an antigovernment activist in eastern Aleppo, who could communicate only in short bursts of text messages, as internet connections were failing.
Hisham al-Skeif, a member of a council in the rebel-held eastern districts of Aleppo, said he was scrambling to find housing for families who had fled from areas that had been recaptured by the government in the past day.
“The problem today, in this moment, is not water and food,” he said, at one point choking with tears. “We are threatened with slaughtering, slaughtering.”
The advances shattered a standoff that had lasted months, after government forces surrounded and besieged the rebel-controlled parts of the city this year, closing off regular access to food, medicine and other supplies.
The battle of Aleppo has followed a pattern established by the government: Encircle a rebel-held area; bombard it with airstrikes, barrel bombs and artillery; hit not only rebels but medical clinics, schools and other civilian structures; and wait for exhausted residents to run away or make a deal.
That approach has worked in the old city of Homs, and in several Damascus suburbs. But eastern Aleppo is by far the biggest prize the government has tried to win in this way.
In the past two weeks of fighting alone, at least 225 civilians, including at least 25 children, have been killed by government bombardments in rebel-held areas. At least 27 civilians, including 11 children, have been killed by rebel shelling.
Despite an outcry from the United Nations and many governments condemning indiscriminate attacks, the world has largely stood by, unable or unwilling to stop the carnage, even as Syria’s civil war has become a proxy war, with Russia and Iran backing the government and the United States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others, to varying degrees, backing the rebels.
“This is violence that is organized and executed by the Assad government with the willing support of the Russians and the Iranians,” the White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, said Monday in response to the latest news from Aleppo.
The furious Turkish president has vowed to open his country’s borders to all migrants in revenge after the European Parliament voted to halt EU membership talks.
Turkey’s bid to join the EU now looks doomed after the European Parliament demanded that membership talks with Ankara are frozen.
The demand was made amid growing unease over Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ‘increasingly authoritarian regime’ in the country
The EU struck a deal earlier this year to return migrants to Turkey in return for a package including aid for the refugees and accelerated membership talks.
But now Erdogan has declared that if the freeze continues he will open Turkey’s gates for all migrants to flood into Europe.
Speaking at a congress on women’s justice in Istanbul, he said: ‘If you go any further, these border gates will be opened.
Speakers taking questions from the press included alt-right supporters (left to right) Peter Brimelow, Kevin MacDonald, Jason Jorjani, and Jared Taylor.
Protesters gather along 14th Street outside of the Reagan Building before the start of the press conference.
Millennial Woes interviews Matt Tate, Richard Spencer and Nathan Damico about protestors:
Russia’s Prime Minister Putin speaks with Tillerson in Sochi in 2011
Israeli missile attack on the Al-Mezzeh Airport, west of Damascus.
