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Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 21 July 2018 05:33.
Putting an end to three decades spent of looking almost exclusively towards the West.
The Three Seas Initiative, a super Visegrád-Group?
Visigrad Post, “The Three Seas Initiative, a new forum of cooperation of twelve Central European countries countervailing the Berlin-Brussels-Paris Axis?”, 13 July 2018:
Talks on regional pipelines at Regional Forum of Three Seas Initiative, 3 July 2018, Rzeszów, Poland. Photo: Olivier Bault.
By Olivier Bault.
Originally published in French on Réinformation TV.
Poland, Rzeszów – The first Forum of the Regions of the Three Seas Initiative (3SI) took place on July 3, in Rzeszów, Poland. This initiative has been started in 2015 by the Polish President Andrzej Duda and the Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović. The 3SI groups twelve Central European countries between the Baltic Sea, the Adriatic Sea and the Black Sea: the three Baltic States, the four ones of the Visegrád-Group (V4) as well as Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria. This meeting aimed to transform this simple intergovernmental cooperation into a border crossing cooperation between the regions concerned by the Three Seas Initiative. Another dimension was then also announced by the President of the Polish Sejm (parliament) with the project of a parliamentary assembly of the Three Seas that could extend beyond the 12 3SI countries by also attracting countries that are not members of the UE, beginning with Ukraine and Moldova.
The Polish president quotes the French Robert Schuman in order to justify the Three Seas Initiative
In its current form, the 3SI is first of all an economic cooperation framework with concrete projects. Because, as the Polish president Andrzej Duda said, quoting the French Robert Schuman when he came to greet the participants from Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia: “Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan. It will be built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity.” Furthermore, Duda emphasized that the Three Seas Initiative had also a political and social dimension, that is particularly important at a moment when the European Union is losing touch with its fundamental principles. Considered by the participating countries as complementary structure and not as a concurrence to the EU, this platform of regional cooperation might potentially – with its 120 millions inhabitants – rebalance the West-East relationship within the 28, and soon 27 members of the Union.
Putting an end to three decades spent of looking almost exclusively towards the West
While they represent 22 % of the EU population, they only produce 10 % of its wealth, as the economic catch up that began after the fall of Communism (except for Austria) is far away from being achieved. And the first goal of the Three Seas Initiative is to develop the energetic and transport infrastructures along the North-South axis and to develop trade on this same axis after thee decades of a development that was principally in a East-West direction. In the domain of energy, the Polish and Lithuanian gas terminals will be connected in the middle term with the Croatian gas terminal on the Adriatic.
This aspect does particularly interest the United States, with which Poland has just signed two very big contracts for the delivery of gas after 2022, after expiration of the contract binding it with the Russian company Gazprom. Not all countries of the Three Seas Initiative wish, like Poland, to stop buying Russian gas but they all support the diversification that the construction of these new gas pipelines will lead to, as there are also important gas fields in the Mediterranean Sea and the planned Baltic Pipe will also allow to deliver Norwegian gas to the region. For the President of the Polish gas company PGNiG (Polish Petroleum Mining and Gas Industry), who was present at the Forum of the Regions of the Three Seas Initiative, the development of connections between the Baltic Sea and the Adriatic is a concurrence to the alliance between the German and Russian companies concerned by the Nord Stream pipeline.
Another project that is being achieved within the 3SI is the Via Carpatia, which includes a motorway and expressway network that will lead from Klaipėda in Lithuania to Thessaloniki in Greece along the Eastern side of the European Union. There are also some long-term projects for creating railway and waterway transport axes, as today in Central Europe, these are all the transport infrastructures that are less developed on a North-South direction than on the East-West one. It might also be discussed in the future – the question has been arisen at the Forum of the Regions of the Three Seas Initiative – to develop direct exchanges for media information for the Central European societies to avoid being informed of what happens at their neighbours’ through the ideological filter of the press agencies and the Western European mainstream media, as it is unfortunately the case nowadays.
The Three Seas Initiative, a super Visegrád-Group?
After the fall of the Berlin wall, the satellite countries of the USSR in Europe fixed their eyes towards the West for a long time and neglected the relationships between each other. Today, with the identity and society crisis that Western Europe is going through, but also with the awareness of an economic relationship where the former communist countries got themselves being dominated, there is a great temptation to meet up with the other Central European countries to speak, when possible, with a single voice in Brussels. That is already done with success by the four countries of the Visegrád-Group (Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary). The Three Seas Initiative could allow twelve countries to make it the same way.
Translated from French by the Visegrád Post.
Representing the largest part of the economy, real estate is followed by goverment and then the financial industry proper. (((Frame Games))) narrates a history culminating in the 2008 financial crisis/real estate melt-down: beginning with the riots of the 1960’s by which blacks effectively extorted property owners; followed by the 1968 Rumford Fair Housing Act which prohibited discrimination with regard to whom one rents or sells ...to a bomb being set with ‘The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977”; then Clinton’s lighting the fuse on these race based programs, which forced banks to make risky loans to blacks (a capacity compounded by taking down the Glass-Steagall Act); to objectivist Greenspan’s instigation of the housing bubble, including with “creative investment mediums”; and finally the 2008 melt down - the biggest theft in American and possibly all known history.
Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 19 July 2018 15:24.
Image source: Reuters via YNet News
Zero Hedge, “Leaked Netanyahu Tape: We Made Trump Cancel The Iran Deal”, 18 July 2018:
On Tuesday an Israeli television channel aired leaked video footage it obtained exclusively showing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasting that he had personally convinced President Trump to abandon the Iran nuclear deal. The statements were made at a small dinner event where he addressed senior members of his Likud party.
The video, aired by Israel’s Kan News shows Netanyahu enthusiastically praising his and Likud leadership’s efforts, saying “We convinced the US president [to exit the deal] and I had to stand up against the whole world and come out against this agreement.” He added, “And we didn’t give up.”
According to a translation of the prime minister’s words by The Times of Israel he further agrees that “the Iranian regime” will “disappear with the help of God” — in the words of one of his supporters, to which Netanyahu adds, “You said it. From your mouth to God.”
התגאה במפגש פוליטי סגור של הליכוד כי הוא זה שהצליח להוביל לביטול הסכם הגרעיןתיעב @netanyahu התגאה במפגש פוליטי סגור של הליכוד כי הוא זה שהצליח להוביל לביטול הסכם הגרעין: “שכנענו את נשיא ארה”ב” #חדשותהערב @shemeshmicha pic.twitter.com/WsWyFdJ8OV
— כאן חדשות (@kann_news) July 17, 2018
The prime minister then begins to speak about the Iranian regime — “not the Iranian people, I have nothing against them” — before he is interrupted by an unidentified person off-screen who says, “It will disappear with the help of God.”
“You said it. From your mouth to God,” Netanyahu says in response as the clip ends.
Netanyahu does not explain in the video aired by Kan how he convinced Trump to exit the deal. Trump had vowed to scrap what he assailed as the “worst deal ever” before becoming president.
The Israeli broadcaster that obtained the footage said it was filmed two weeks ago.
When early this week the New York Times published the Israeli account of how a daring Mossad operation deep inside Iran netted what are said to be tens of thousands of secret Iranian nuclear documents in an “Ocean’s 11”-style heist, we noted the Times story appeared to be a propaganda victory lap of sorts meant to further bolster Israeli intelligence’s reputation and far-reaching abilities abroad.
In recording, Netanyahu boasts Israel convinced Trump to..
Public broadcaster airs clip of PM telling Likud activists, US exit came after he stood up against the whole world by opposing accord. - Times of Israel.
Netanyahu unveiled the stolen cache of about 55,000 pages of documents and 183 CDs in a television address that the said proved the existence of an illegal and ongoing secret program to “test and build nuclear weapons” called Project Amad.
Just days after the colorful and prop-laden Netanyahu presentation, President Trump announced he would follow through on prior threats to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal, or JCPOA. Observers noted at the time that Netanyahu’s address had a single audience in mind in the person of Donald Trump during the very week the White House was intensely mulling a final decision over whether to finally pull the plug on the JCPOA.
Nothing really new in @netanyahu Iran speech. Confirms that Iran closed down nuclear weapons program in 2003. Continued technology efforts. In principle all of this well known. No allegation that Iran cheats on 2015 nuclear deal. https://t.co/IJElnZ3JmM
— Carl Bildt (@carlbildt) April 30, 2018
While it appears Netanyahu had his April televised presentation in mind when he says in the clip “I had to stand up against the whole world,” there is also little doubt that his personal appeals to Trump on the issue were even more direct and persistent. Other signatories to the deal brokered in 2015 under the Obama administration have vowed to stick by it, which include Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China — even as the White House threatens punitive measures against any country that continues to do business with Iran.
Earlier this summer it was confirmed that a high level joint US-Israeli “working group” under the oversight of National Security Advisor John Bolton has been meeting for months with the goal of facilitating regime change in Tehran. As Axios reported: “Israel and the United States formed a joint working group a few months ago that is focused on internal efforts to encourage protests within Iran and pressure the country’s government.” So it’s very clear that Netanyahu has the White House’s ear on Iran (though this is no surprise).
Meanwhile, Netanyahu has posted to his official Twitter account a clip of Trump saying that Russian President Putin is a “Bibi fan”. The statement came in a Fox News interview following the US president’s summit and press conference with Putin.
In the uploaded clip Trump said he and Putin “came to a lot of good conclusions” during the meeting, including “a really good conclusion for Israel, something very strong.” Trump said Putin is “a believer in Israel; he is a fan of Bibi and really helping him a lot – and will help a lot, which is good for all of us.”
Netanyahu posted the interview segment with the commentary in Hebrew: “I will continue to strengthen Israel as a rising global force.”
Likely, Netanyahu will continue his boasting about his personal intervention and impact with the White House both in public and in private, so more such revelatory footage will probably surface in the coming months.
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 18 July 2018 18:00.
Prometheus unbound. Orban cracks down on immigration (AP) Photo: AP/Press Association Images
ITV Report, “Hungary to pull out of UN accord on migration”, 18 July 2018:
Hungary’s foreign minister said his country will pull out of a United Nations accord on migration to be adopted in December because it goes against his country’s security interests.
Foreign minister Peter Szijjarto said the UN’s Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, the final draft of which was released last week, also goes against common sense.
He added that Hungary has doubts about the accord’s non-binding status.
Under Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who was elected in April to his third consecutive term, Hungary has adopted strict anti-migration measures and made it very difficult for refugees to obtain asylum.
The UN document is a “non-legally binding, co-operative framework” meant to foster “international co-operation among all relevant actors on migration, acknowledging that no state can address migration alone, and upholds the sovereignty of states and their obligations under international law”.
Netanyahu had a significant role in arranging the Trump-Putin meeting along with some of its key objectives. Note that Netanyahu has been close to the highly corrupt Kushner family since Jared was a child; and it was Jared who negotiated Trump’s route to the White House by means of an avowal to undo the Iran Deal.
The Jerusalem Post, “Intelligence Report: Israel needs Trump and Putin in Syria”, 15 July 2018:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shakes hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin . (photo credit: KOBI GIDEON/GPO)
Though he hasn’t been present there, the spirit of Israel’s prime minister hovered all over the summit meeting between the US and Russian presidents in Helsinki in mid-July. Benjamin Netanyahu worked laboriously mobilizing all his influence in Washington to persuade Donald Trump to meet Vladimir Putin.
The two leaders have mysterious relations that are unfolding as a special investigation of former FBI director Robert Muller into alleged Russian meddling in the last US presidential elections is progressing. Trump and Putin were scheduled to discuss international matters from North Korea to the Russian occupation of the Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine to the trade wars declared by Trump and the conflicts in the Middle East.
The Israeli prime minister, however, is mainly interested in two topics: Iran and the civil war in Syria. He needs both leaders to back his policy on these fronts.
On July 11, four days before the summit, Netanyahu was set to meet Putin and sit next to him in his private box at a Moscow soccer stadium watching together one of the two World Cup’s semi-finals.
It will be Netanyahu’s 10th meeting with the Russian leader in the last three years. He has more Putin’s hours than any other leader in the world.
The frequency and urgency of his encounters with Putin are a result of the fact that the Syrian civil war appears to be reaching its end and the army of President Bashar Assad is on its way to regain its position along the Israeli border on the Golan Heights.
Israel’s interests are to allow the Syrian army to return to its posts along the border as mandated by the 1974 agreement on “Disengagement of Forces” between the two sides, which ended the 1973 Yom Kippur War, while preventing any presence of Iranian, Lebanese Hezbollah or Shi’ite militias in undefined areas near the border.
After seven-and-a-half years of violence and bloodshed, including the use of chemical weapons, the death toll among Syrian government forces, opposition forces and civilians is estimated by UN and civil rights groups to be more than 500,000. As of December 2017, approximately 13.1 million people were in need of humanitarian assistance in Syria, with 6.3 million people displaced internally, and an additional 5.4 million registered refugees, making the Syrian situation among the largest humanitarian crises in the world.
Throughout the war years, Israeli policy remained more or less unchanged. Though some of the Israeli intelligence estimates were wrong (“Assad will be toppled within three weeks,” then- defense minister Ehud Barak predicted in 2011), the policy of non-intervention and not taking sides was consistent, with a few minor exceptions.
The Israeli “red lines” set by Netanyahu and the three defense ministers who served under him during this period – Barak, Moshe Ya’alon and Avigdor Liberman – consisted until a year ago of the following.
• To ensure the peace on the Israeli side of the border by responding to any violation of its sovereignty, deliberate or errant, by the Syrian army or rebel groups.
• To provide humanitarian aid to the villages next to the border, thus ensuring their gratitude and minimizing their incentives to act against Israel. So far, Israel has treated in its hospitals 3,500 victims, many of them children and women, and supplied more than a hundred tons of medical aid, food, clothes and tents worth nearly $100 million, which mostly was financed by contributions from evangelical communities in the US.
• According to foreign reports, the “good border” relations also included a supply of light weapons, ammunition and communication gear to the moderate, national-secular rebels groups near the border. In return, according to these reports, Israel, gleaned good intelligence on what was happening in Syria and beyond.
• To secure the safety of the Syrian Druze community (roughly half a million people), in order to calm down Israel’s own small Druze community (about 120,000), whose members serve in the Israeli armed and security forces and are considered loyal citizens of the Jewish state.
• To crush by military force efforts by Iran and Hezbollah to create a terrorist infrastructure on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights.
• To conduct air strikes and demolish transfers from Iran via Syria to Hezbollah of sophisticated weapons.
These goals were more or less achieved by a wise policy of the Israeli military and government by employing the tactics of a tightrope dance that combined determination, sensitivity and caution.
Even the arrival of the thousands of members of the Russian contingency and especially its air force and state-of-the-art anti-aircraft batteries didn’t stop Israel from preserving and enhancing its national interests. This was possible by establishing direct “hotlines” between Hmeimim Air Base in northwestern Latakia, where Russian headquarters is located, and the IDF and Israel Air Force headquarters in Tel Aviv.
The occasional talks between Israel and Russian officers helped “deconflicting” and the prevention of dog fights between Israeli and Russian pilots. On top of that, in his rounds of meetings with Putin, it seems that Netanyahu obtained from the Russia leader the license to almost freely operate in Syria as long as targets were not fully identified with the Assad regime.
But a year or so ago, Israel’s red lines were redefined and extended. While all the above interests are still in place, Israel has added a more important goal: to remove the presence of Iranian, Hezbollah and Shi’ite militias as far as possible from the Israeli border.
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 11 July 2018 04:34.
New Observer, “China Identified as Source of Ozone-Destroying CFC-11 Despite Worldwide Ban”, 10 July 2018:
China’s foam-blowing industry has been identified as the source of a dramatic increase in the ozone-destroying CFC-11 chemical, despite a worldwide ban on the production and use of that chemical, a new environmental report has revealed.
An investigation carried out by the UK-based NGO Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) said that 18 companies in 10 Chinese provinces confirmed their use of CFC-11 for making foams used to insulate buildings and appliances.
“Producers and traders of polyurethane foam blowing agent repeatedly told EIA sources that the majority of China’s foam industry continues to use CFC-11 due to its better quality and lower price.”
Some companies appear to produce CFC-11 themselves. But traders were also supplied by factories in undisclosed locations, the EIA said.
Several companies also referred to the ease with which CFC-11 could be exported in the pre-blended polyol compound used to make the foams, it added.
This comes in the wake of “shocking evidence showing significant and unexplained emissions of the ozone-destroying chemical CFC-11 in the atmosphere”, said EIA.
In May 2018 scientists revealed that atmospheric levels of CFC-11, a potent ozone depleting substance banned since 2010, were significantly higher than expected, leading them to conclude that new illegal production and use of CFC-11 was occurring in East Asia.
Traders and buyers of CFC-11 in China estimated that it is used in the majority of China’s rigid PU foam sector.
EIA’s calculations show that emission estimates associated with the level of use reported by these companies can explain the majority of emissions identified in the atmospheric study. In addition there is significant potential for illegal international trade in CFC-11 containing pre-formulated polyols for foam manufacturing in other countries.
“Several companies acknowledged the illegality of their actions and explained that it was used because it was cheaper and made more effective foams,” the report continued.
THE EIA report concluded by saying that “China has a significant compliance issue to address which requires an immediate clampdown on illegal production and use of CFC-11, along with policy reform and effective intelligence-led enforcement” and that the “scale of the compliance issue is such that it cannot be treated as a series of isolated incidents.”
Reuters, “Japanese PM visits flood disaster zone, new warnings issued”, 11 July 2018:
KUMANO, Japan (Reuters) - Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited flood-stricken parts of Japan on Wednesday as the death toll from the worst weather disaster in 36 years reached 176 and health worries increased amid scorching heat and the threat of new floods.
Torrential rain unleashed floods and landslides in western Japan last week, bringing death and destruction in particular to neighborhoods built decades ago near steep slopes.
At least 176 people were killed, the government said, with dozens missing in Japan’s worst weather disaster since 1982.
Abe, who canceled an overseas trip to deal with the disaster, was criticized after a photograph posted on Twitter showed Abe and his defense minister at a party with lawmakers just as the rains intensified.
After observing the damage from a helicopter flying over Okayama, one of the hardest-hit areas, Abe visited a crowded evacuation center. He crouched down on the floor to speak with people, many of them elderly, and asked about their health. He clasped one man’s hands as they spoke.
Image source: Reuters via YNet News
Prometheus unbound. Orban cracks down on immigration (AP) Photo: AP/Press Association Images
