[Mail] Russian president Vladimir Putin is planting troops and weapons in Libya to establish a strategic stronghold against the west, intelligence chiefs say.
Prime Minister Theresa May has been warned that the country will become Putin's 'new Syria' by using it as a base for missiles.
Two military bases have been set up in the towns of Benghazi and Tobruk under the cover of Wagner Group, a private military firm.
It is believed Moscow's main priority is to take control in the North African country, which is the biggest illegal immigration route to Europe, The Sun Online reports, with fears the influx would be 'like a tap' being turned on.
'Dozens' of GRU secret service personnel and Spetznaz special forces officers are reportedly training in the east of the country.
Kalibr missiles as well as S300 air defence systems are also thought to be on Libyan ground. The Kremlin backs General Khalifa Haftar, the country's most powerful warlord. Russia is channeling equipment to his troops in the Libyan National Army.
Haftar has established himself as the military ruler of swathes of the country's eastern regions. A senior Whitehall source said that if Russia controls Libya's coastline, migrants could seek to cross the Mediterranean as though a tap had been turned on.
The source said Putin was attempting to take ungoverned space in order to 'exact maximum influence over the West'.
'The fact is we are extremely vulnerable to both immigration flows and oil shock from Libya,' they said, adding that the consequences for Western democracy could be 'catastrophic'.
Establishing a Russian presence could allow Putin to conduct operations in the western Med.
#1
Interestingly, neither Russia nor it's former satellite partners are throwing out the welcome mat for the Mohammedan. No sense in committing demographic suicide by re-populating The Motherland now is there ?
#2
One of the Great Games in the 1700s was to contain France by a series of alliances to deter expansion from its borders. The Soviets felt the same about American alliances in the 50s. Now someone in Moscow is concerned about the idiots in the EU doing nothing to stop what they may perceive as an Islamic effort to encircle Russia. Cut the people logistics from North Africa to the cheese eating surrender monkey's running the EU.
#8
Why do UK intelligence fear this move? Do they fear that he'll send more Muslims over then they currently allow (ha, ha, ha). You don't need to control the country to do that, you just need to bring in some ships.
My guess is Putin wants to control more oil and thus have more control over the price.
[RT] An intelligence service given free rein to commit ‘serious crimes’ in its own country is an intelligence service that is the enemy of its people.
The quite astounding revelation that Britain’s domestic intelligence service, MI5, has enjoyed this very freedom for decades has only just been made public at a special tribunal in London, set up to investigate the country’s intelligence services at the behest of a coalition of human rights groups, alleging a pattern of illegality up to and including collusion in murder.
The hitherto MI5 covert policy sanctioning its agents to commit and/or solicit serious crimes, as and when adjudged provident, is known as the Third Direction. This codename has been crafted, it would appear, by someone with a penchant for all things James Bond within an agency whose average operative is more likely to be 5’6” and balding with a paunch and bad teeth than any kind of lantern-jawed 007.
[NYPost] With China still running a record trade surplus with the US, it seems premature — to say the least — to say that Trump has won his long-overdue trade war with China.
But it is not too early to conclude that, despite their threat of retaliatory tariffs, China’s Communist authorities know that they have lost.
The increased tariffs to date, combined with the threat of more, have already clipped the wings of China’s economic rise. Its stock market is down 21 percent year over year, industrial output is slowing and its currency is weakening.
Looking beyond the bluff and bluster emanating from Beijing, there is evidence that Party leader Xi Jinping is looking for a way to stand down.
#1
...Or the Chinese are just looking to wait him out and deal with the next US President. They have been manipulating 'foreign devils' for many centuries... Don't get cocky.
#6
Don't know if China is "quaking in it's boots" so much as shifting it's feet for the next move.
In martial arts you watch for strikes from the extremities, but the chest and torso tell you which way your opponent will move. Center of mass.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
10/09/2018 14:54 Comments ||
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#8
Another 2 years and China will be hurt bad. I feel people don't appreciate just how terrible their position is. America holds all the cards. Either they cave, or their export industries shrivel up. Already businesses are fleeing China. Their profits were razor thin and now they're gone.
Posted by: Herb McCoy ||
10/09/2018 16:04 Comments ||
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#9
We've been giving them $500 billion/year for the last 25 years. We gave up huge swaths of our manufacturing base and jobs to China. You would be hard-pressed to find anything manufactured here for a long time. None of us got to vote on this... until 2016.
[SARA] Former FBI General Counsel James Baker told lawmakers last week that based on conversations with senior FBI officials, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was "seriously" considering secretly recording President Trump’s conversations. Rosenstein also discussed the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment on the president in an effort to remove him from office for being unfit. This, according to sources with direct knowledge of Baker’s deposition.
Baker said he met with former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and former FBI attorney Lisa Page shortly after their meeting with Rosenstein in May, 2017. He told lawmakers that McCabe, Page and Rosenstein had discussed the possibility of secretly recording President Trump. Baker, who was the top lawyer for the FBI and a close confidant of Comey, noted that he was not in the meeting with Rosenstein. A source with direct knowledge of the testimony claims Baker testified that "Andy McCabe, Lisa Page took seriously what Rosenstein had said, and when they returned to the office, the three of them discussed the possibility of secretly recording Trump."
Baker told lawmakers during his deposition last Wednesday, that he told Page and McCabe that "he didn’t think it was unethical’ to secretly record the president.
"He interpreted what McCabe and Page had said as serious," another source with direct knowledge of Baker’s deposition said. "Baker also added that he ’didn’t do a legal analysis on...the issue of ’ bugging the president.'"
Baker’s testimony to lawmakers coincides with a New York Times story published in September that suggested Rosenstein was behind a move in May, 2017 to remove the president after he ordered the firing of former FBI Director James Comey. The irony, however, was that on May 9, 2017, Rosenstein had written the letter outlining the reasons Comey was unfit to serve as FBI director stating, "The director was wrong to usurp the Attorney General’s authority on July 5, 2016, and announce his conclusion that the case should be closed without prosecution. It is not the function of the Director to make such an announcement." The letter continues, "The Director ignored another longstanding principle: we do not hold press conferences to release derogatory information about the subject of a declined criminal investigation."
#5
IMHO Rosenstein has some serious legal problems. Rosenstein might have flipped to try to save his arse but I don't see him as AG--couldn't trust him and Trump's base wouldn't accept that.
[Washington Examiner] Scott Kelly, a retired American astronaut with multiple space flights under his belt, apologized Sunday after quoting Winston Churchill and calling the 20th century British prime minister "one of the greatest leaders of modern times."
"Did not mean to offend by quoting Churchill. My apologies. I will go and educate myself further on his atrocities, racist views which I do not support. My point was we need to come together as one nation. We are all Americans. That should transcend partisan politics," Kelly wrote on Twitter in the evening.
Eight hours prior, in a tweet that has not been deleted as of press time, Kelly cited Churchill to lament the current state of affairs.
"One of the greatest leaders of modern times, Sir Winston Churchill said, 'in victory, magnanimity.' I guess those days are over," Kelly tweeted.
Some Twitter users reacted to Kelly offering an apology, telling him he overreacted to what appeared to be a wave of online trolls.
#5
...I think I'm going to start referring to the other side as the Red Guards.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
10/09/2018 5:08 Comments ||
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#6
..I have. Though the nice thing about it is that via twitter et al, they'll all self identifying. That is they are making their own lists, no need to go through the tedious process of compiling lists later.
Posted by: Frank G ||
10/09/2018 13:35 Comments ||
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#11
As I said yesterday... the whatever-they-ares* can explain at length about how everyone who disagrees with them is a white nationalist supremacist racist rape gang member, but when push comes to shove they're very strangely triggered by the person who was most responsible for the defeat of Nazi Germany.
This stands out to me.
(And he was originally quoting Churchill, I take it, as a criticism of conservatives feeling elation at having temporarily defeated the mass slander of the day... and still, he must be attacked by the other liberals for this?)
* (they're emotionally attached to the left, but I don't know what I want to call them because despite all the bad results the old left produced for the working class, they at least paid lip service to the idea that they liked the proletariat. I'm out of ideas).
[RS] I don’t know how anyone can escape the conclusion that the ludicrous over-the-top accusations from the alleged "witness" that Michael Avenatti tossed at Kavanaugh actually helped him gain the confirmation.
At least, that’s what Collins says when she’s specifically asked about it:
This idiot actually thought his accusations would kill the nomination and help him get the notoriety to help him run for president. Instead, everyone is blaming him for screwing it up!!
#2
MSM parroting anything the Marxist DNC puts out does not help. They are on the wrong side of the fence during a sordid period of US political history.
Posted by: Neville Dark Lord of the Wee Folk7365 ||
10/09/2018 1:48 Comments ||
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#3
MSM parroting anything the Marxist DNC puts out does not help.
The MSM is the propaganda arm of the “Marxist DNC” and are in fact, Marxists themselves. Their efforts are coordinated.
#7
Mixed feelings. It makes me sad that she took that long to get to yes despite the total lack of evidence. Yet having Avenatti take the fall (and the Dems not learning the lessons) is pretty sweet.
#8
Avenatti has jumped on more headlines than Slick Willie has jumped women. Probably he did hurt the Dem efforts to derail Kavanaugh. Whatever the case, Sen. Collins hit a homerun. It was right on target. The Dems had nothing--no evidence of wrongdoing. It looks, more and more, that the entire thing was fabricated as was the Hillary/FBI/DNC/Steele dossier. The Dems don't seem to be very good at making up or covering up.
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] The stories about Leb with its difficult situation and nightmares never end. It’s a beautiful country with a good land and nice people that have experience in tourism and hospitality.
But times have changed, and anyone who has beautiful memories of this country can see how present problems are strangling Leb to the point of paralysis.
Criticizing Leb’s situation aims to defend it as we liked it. People fell into the trap of naïve optimism due to what was known as the "new era." They thought their crises will be resolved and the local press and media generally followed this wave. However,
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
10/09/2018 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11128 views]
Top|| File under: Hezbollah
#1
I'm not looking forward to the next Lebanon war at all.
[Daily Beast - 18 Aug 2018] The director of the CIA is keeping her mouth shut while her boss, President Donald Trump, punishes her predecessor, John Brennan, for his vociferous criticism. It’s an act that even a man who famously clashed with Brennan and his CIA calls "appalling."
Brennan, a career CIA official whom Barack Obama made the agency’s director over substantial criticism from the political left, saw Trump take away his security clearance on Wednesday. Disconnected from any allegation, let alone evidence, that Brennan abused his clearance, Trump’s maneuver struck many intelligence observers and former officials as a naked power play: a message to the intelligence community that the president expects their personal loyalty.
But CIA Director Gina Haspel, whose nomination Brennan very publicly supported and whose integrity Brennan vouched for, is remaining silent, even as the White House suggests that the same fate may await other intelligence veterans who consider Trump a danger to the country.
Asked if Haspel approved of Trump stripping Brennan of his security clearance and if she had known about it or advised the president on the issue in advance, CIA spokesman Tim Barrett told The Daily Beast only: "CIA does not comment on individual security clearances." He declined to address The Daily Beast’s follow-up questions.
#1
The odious Brennan - Daily Beast conjecture aside, I too have noticed the silence and lack of media involvement from Director Haspel. It could mean she's a 'quiet professional,' concentrating on her primary job as the nation's top intelligence officer. I like it.
Posted by: Bobby on the road ||
10/09/2018 8:37 Comments ||
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#3
Brennan doesn't need any help in flapping his mouth.
It was reported on Jan. 13, 2017, that Schumer Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said the following: President-elect Donald Trump is “being really dumb” by taking on the intelligence community...they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,”
The first thing Trump did after inauguration was to travel to Langley to address CIA employees. He was sending a message to the spooks. Soon, thereafter, he fired Brennan and appointed Pompeo to head up the CIA. Haspel was well-vetted. Trump not so dumb.
Schumer is looking like the a$$ that he is. C'mon NY elect someone who better represents you the next time. Schumer is a Party hack; not a Senator who represents you.
[Hot Air] The San Franciso Chronicle published a story Saturday about the city’s "safe sites" for drug dealers. Officially there aren’t any such sites but unofficially, police say it’s almost impossible to get convicted of drug dealing in parts of the city, including the Tenderloin. In fact, parts of the city have become an open-air drug market, drawing in dealers from other parts of the city because of the sense that there are places where the law isn’t being enforced very stringently:
"It’s almost impossible to get convicted in this city," said [Sgt. Kevin] Healy, who works in the Police Department’s narcotics division. "The message needs to be sent that it’s not OK to be selling drugs. It’s not allowed anywhere else. Where else can you walk up to someone you don’t know and purchase crack and heroin? Is there such a place?"...
Police say drug dealers from the East Bay ride BART into San Francisco every day to prey on the addicts slumped on our sidewalks, and yet the city that claims to so desperately want to help those addicts often looks the other way.
You can walk through the Tenderloin, Civic Center, South of Market and the Mission and easily spot men handing over little plastic baggies with drugs in exchange for cash like it’s no big thing. In broad daylight. In front of pedestrians. Even in front of police...
I walked with Officer Brian Donohue, who works out of Northern Station, around Van Ness Avenue, Polk Street and parts of the Tenderloin on a recent afternoon. Unlike so many of our city leaders, it’s clear Donohue is really trying to combat the problem. He’s worked with Healy and his partner, Officer Calvin Wang, to build cases against a raft of drug dealers, almost none of whom has a San Francisco address.
He called the Tenderloin and surrounding neighborhoods "an open-air narcotics market" where dealers wrap drugs in plastic so they can easily swallow them if they see police.
One result of this open-air drug market is a lot of addicts living on the streets. San Francisco’s new Mayor, London Breed, is committed to dealing with the rampant homeless problem but doesn’t seem to have any plan for making a crackdown on the dealers whose product ensures the addicts remain on the street. She tells the Chronicle, "What I’m trying to do is offer some individuals who are selling drugs an alternative." Here’s an alternative offer: Stop selling drugs or we’ll put you in prison. That doesn’t seem to be an option.
[SultanKnish] The first episode of the Murphy Brown revival featured two guest stars, one who appeared on stage, Hillary Clinton, and one offstage, an old Clinton pal and accused sexual predator, Les Moonves.
The only reason that the Murphy Brown revival, with its doddering cast creakily aiming cheap shots at Trump and fetid kisses at Clinton, exists is former CBS CEO and chairman, Les Moonves. It was a revival that no one asked for, but Moonves has allegedly never been shy about exposing himself to women, forcing them to perform oral sex on him, and spending CBS cash to prop up the Clintons.
Moonves approved the Murphy Brown revival in two days.
“Les made it all happen,” Candice Bergen, who plays Murphy Brown, told the New York Times.
But then new revelations emerged about what the founding member of the "Commission on Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality in the Workplace" had been doing to women for 20 years.
As reports emerged of Moonves’ abuse of women, the feminist heroine went on defending him.
“I think there should be some parameters. I think Les’s behavior was — it was a different time. He was a different man. Is it behavior unbecoming? Yeah. But I go back with CBS, with the first ‘Murphy.’ I have great respect for Les.”
“I would really hate to see Les go,” she said.
The “different time” included 1986, when a television executive alleged that Moonves told her he was going to drive her to lunch, but instead took her to a secluded area, “grabbed my head and he took it all the way down onto his penis and pushed his penis into my mouth.”
That’s what the man who made the iconic feminist show happen was really like. Like Harvey Weinstein and Meryl Streep, there was feminism out front and sexual assault in the back at CBS. And its feminist icons acted as shields for Moonves’ monstrous abuses lulling his victims into a false sense of security.
The special bond between Bill Clinton and Les Moonves that made the two men friends was no mystery. Like Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein, and Bill Clinton and Harvey Weinstein, they were both predators.
Despite Bergen’s defense, Les went.
And CBS’ investment in the Clintons, one that cost countless untold millions, and its culture of sexual harassment and abuse, goes with him. Murphy Brown is his final Clinton legacy.
Like a negative vortex, the Murphy Brown revival only exists because Hillary Clinton lost an election.
“If Hillary Clinton was elected there’d be no artistic reason for this show to be on the air,” Steve Peterman, a producer on Murphy Brown, admitted.
Spite is not an “artistic” reason. But it’s good enough for the entertainment industry.
I think it’s wonderful that they are so selflessly throwing their money directly into the economy like that, without any hope of making any profit whatsoever. Mr. Wife and I watched part of the first episode — pathetic.
A potential pick for the next appointment of Associate Supreme Court Justice, Amy Coney Barrett. The Dems will go apoplectic will this nomination. Ginsburg is 85 now and can barely complete a full sentence without pausing.
[SCOTUSblog] In November 2017, President Donald Trump released a revised list of potential Supreme Court nominees. The November 2017 list was an expanded version of two earlier lists, announced during the 2016 presidential campaign, from which then-candidate Trump pledged, if elected, to pick a successor to the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who died on February 13, 2016. First on the new list ‐ because it was in alphabetical order ‐ was Amy Coney Barrett, a Notre Dame law professor (and former Scalia clerk) who had recently been confirmed to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit. Barrett’s confirmation hearings had received considerable attention after Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee ‐ most notably, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California ‐ grilled her on the role of her Catholic faith in judging. Feinstein’s criticism did not stop Barrett from being confirmed, and since then there has been speculation that it may have in fact strengthened her case to fill the seat that will be vacated by the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy.
The 46-year-old Barrett grew up in Metairie, Louisiana, a suburb of New Orleans, and attended St. Mary’s Dominican High School, a Catholic girls’ school in New Orleans. Barrett graduated magna cum laude from Rhodes College, a liberal arts college in Tennessee affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, in 1994. (Other high-profile alumni of the school include Abe Fortas, who served as a justice on the Supreme Court from 1965 to 1969 and Claudia Kennedy, the first woman to become a three-star general in the U.S. Army.) At Rhodes, she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and was also recognized as the most outstanding English major and for having the best senior thesis.
After graduating from Rhodes, Barrett went to law school at Notre Dame on a full-tuition scholarship. She excelled there as well: She graduated summa cum laude in 1997, received awards for having the best exams in 10 of her courses and served as executive editor of the school’s law review.
Barrett then held two high-profile conservative clerkships, first with Judge Laurence Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, from 1997-1998 then with the late Justice Antonin Scalia, from 1998-1999. After leaving her Supreme Court clerkship, she spent a year practicing law at Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin, a prestigious Washington D.C. litigation boutique that also claims former U.S. solicitor general Seth Waxman, former deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick, and two regular contributors to this blog ‐ John Elwood and editor Edith Roberts ‐ as alums. Barrett went to Baker Botts, a Texas-based firm, after Miller Cassidy merged with the larger law firm, in 2000 and spent another year there before leaving for academia. To the chagrin of Democratic senators during her confirmation process, Barrett was only able to recall a few of the cases on which she had worked, and she indicated that she had not argued any appeals while in private practice.
#1
If she worked alongside Jamie Gorelick - mistress to disaster - for any length of time without quitting - then I have some immediate reservations about her character.
#2
Me wonders how the Dems will attack her. Because they can't pull the Clarence Thomas/Brett Kavanaugh sexual game, I wonder what kind of media circus this would create.
#7
Simple. She will immediately and single-handed lay overturn not just Roe v.Wade, but also take away wimen’s rights to any and all abortions, making wimmins second-class slaves to the White Priv.... You get the idea.
Posted by: Bobby on the road ||
10/09/2018 12:07 Comments ||
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#8
Ginsberg funeral? Never happen. An occasional dusting and spot cleaning will be all that is necessary.
I think Barrett needs more seasoning, and is somewhat of a blank slate to me.
Let's take a lesson from the O'Connor and Kennedy tenures.
And if picking Barrett is about replacing a woman with another woman, then that just means that "conservatism" is about accepting the Left's premises and criteria, and trying to be "better at leftism" than they are.
Which is pathetic.
Kavanaugh selected a group consisting entirely of females to be his SCOTUS clerks even before the hearings started.
[Heather MacDonald, Manhatten Institute) In 1903, during America’s darkest period of hate, W. E. B. Du Bois heartbreakingly affirmed his intellectual affinity with Western civilization.
"I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas," Du Bois wrote in "The Souls of Black Folk." "I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension."
Half a century earlier, Frederick Douglass had paid tribute to the 18th-century British orators whom, at age 12, he had discovered in a collection of political speeches.
"Every opportunity afforded me, for a time, was spent in diligently perusing [’The Columbian Orator’]," Douglass recalled in his autobiography. "This volume was, indeed, a rich treasure," he wrote, for the speeches‐by Richard Sheridan, Charles James Fox, and William Pitt‐"gave tongue to many interesting thoughts, which had frequently flashed through my soul, and died away for want of utterance."
How much things have changed.
In 2016, a student petition at Yale University called for dismantling the college’s decades-long requirement that English majors take a course covering Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and Wordsworth. Reading these authors "creates a culture that is especially hostile to students of color," complained the students.
Sadly, there was by then nothing remarkable in this demand. Attacks on the canon as an instrument of exclusivity and oppression have flourished since the 1980s, when Jesse Jackson famously joined Stanford University students in chanting, "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go."
But in the past few years the worldview behind such antagonism has become even more militant, transforming not just universities but the world at large. The demand for "safe spaces," reflexive accusations of racism and sexism, and contempt for Enlightenment values of reason and due process are no longer an arcane species of academic self-involvement‐they increasingly infuse business, government, and civil society.
The roots of the diversity delusion lie in a charged set of ideas that now dominate higher education: that human beings are defined by their skin color, sex, and sexual preference; that discrimination based on those characteristics has been the driving force in Western civilization; and that America remains a profoundly bigoted place, where heterosexual white males continue to deny opportunity to everyone else.
These ideas, which may be subsumed under the categories of "diversity" and identity politics, have remade the university. Entire fields have sprung up around race, ethnicity, sex, and gender identity. Coursework in traditional departments also views the past and present through that same self-engrossed lens.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[SARA] Former FBI General Counsel James Baker told lawmakers last week that based on conversations with senior FBI officials, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was "seriously" considering secretly recording President Trump’s conversations. Rosenstein also discussed the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment on the president in an effort to remove him from office for being unfit. This, according to sources with direct knowledge of Baker’s deposition.
[RS] I don’t know how anyone can escape the conclusion that the ludicrous over-the-top accusations from the alleged "witness" that Michael Avenatti tossed at Kavanaugh actually helped him gain the confirmation.
[Hot Air] The San Franciso Chronicle published a story Saturday about the city’s "safe sites" for drug dealers. Officially there aren’t any such sites but unofficially, police say it’s almost impossible to get convicted of drug dealing in parts of the city, including the Tenderloin. In fact, parts of the city have become an open-air drug market, drawing in dealers from other parts of the city because of the sense that there are places where the law isn’t being enforced very stringently:
[Heather MacDonald, Manhatten Institute) In 1903, during America’s darkest period of hate, W. E. B. Du Bois heartbreakingly affirmed his intellectual affinity with Western civilization.
