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Russia’s Ministry of Justice, on Tuesday, designated nine U.S. media outlets as foreign agents. The measure came in “retaliation” after the U.S. designated the Russian State funded Russia Today (RT) USA as a foreign agent. Independent journalists and media fear the battle of the giants will make it more difficult for independent and “unorthodox” journalists and media while major State and corporate-funded giants are likely to continue unabated.

Russia listed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), the Voice of America (VOA), and several other affiliates as “foreign agents. RFE/RL president Tom Kent said in a statement that the Russian Ministry of Justice indicated the new designation will involve more “limitations” on the work of its company in Russia. He added that “the full nature of these limitations is unknown,” but vowed that the network remains “committed to continuing our journalistic work, in the interests of providing accurate and objective news to our Russian-speaking audiences.” Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law in November empowering the government to designate media outlets receiving funding from abroad as “foreign agents” and impose sanctions against them. Russian officials have called the new legislation a “symmetrical response” to what they describe as U.S. pressure on Russian media. On November 13, Russian state-funded television channel RT registered as a foreign agent in the United States under a decades-old law called the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman said FARA is aimed at promoting transparency but does not restrict the television network’s operation in the United States. The U.S. State Department has condemned Russia’s law, saying it obstructs press freedom. “New Russian legislation that allows the Ministry of Justice to label media outlets as ‘foreign agents’ and to monitor or block certain internet activity presents yet another threat to free media in Russia,” State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert said in a statement last month.

Venezuela’s Congress reports that the inflation rate has reached quadruple digits and that the inflation rate in 2017 will top some 2,000 percent. The opposition-controlled legislature reported that inflation reached quadruple digits with consumer prices rising by a whopping 1,369 percent between January and November 2017.

Congress began publishing its own data on inflation after the socialist party (PSUV) administration stopped releasing them. Venezuela’s central bank reported an inflation of 180 percent in 2015 and 240 percent in 2016 which so far had been the highest on record. The central bank and the administration of President Nicolas Maduro have since stopped providing detailed inflation figures. Congress reported that prices rose by 56.7 percent in November. The legislators also reported that they expect that 2017 inflation would top a whopping 2,000 percent. Monetary liquidity grew 14 percent in a single week of November, according to official data, its steepest rise since the central bank began keeping records in 1940. OPEC member Venezuela was struck by a severe economic crisis when oil prices slumped in 2014 leading to shortages of food and medicines, among others. The socialist party (PSUV) administration of President Nicolas Maduro is blaming the crisis on an alleged economic war against Venezuela, allegedly led by the United States, and allegedly in collaboration with members of the opposition.

Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander Qassem Soleimani says his nation is ready to support Palestinian forces in the Gaza Strip, days after the U.S. recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.Soleimani, commander of the Al Quds force, made the offer in a phone call late Monday with leaders of groups in Gaza, according to the Revolutionary Guard Corps’ website, Sepah News, which didn’t give details of the assistance proffered. Other forces in the region are ready to defend the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, Soleimani also told the Gaza faction leaders, without identifying them. The mosque is Islam’s third-holiest shrine and a frequent flashpoint for tensions between Israel and the Palestinians.Palestinians claim Jerusalem’s eastern sector, where the mosque stands, as the capital of a future state, and they oppose the U.S. move. Hamas has called for another uprising against Israel in response, though so far protests have been limited. Soleimani spoke a day after the head of Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement, Hassan Nasrallah, called on all “resistance” groups in the region to come up with a unified strategy to take back Jerusalem. Iran’s Quds force operates beyond the country’s borders and has fought Islamic State in Iraq and backed President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Iran also supports proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas that have warred with Israel.

As Turkey prepares to launch an operation against Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) terrorists in Syria’s Afrin, the U.S. has threatened war with Turkey in the PKK-occupied city, in a report published by the CIA-affiliated Rand Corporation. The most recent report, titled “U.S. Strategic Interests in the Middle East and Implications for the Army,” was published by the Rand Corporation, an American think tank closely affiliated with the CIA. The report concluded that opposing interests between Ankara and Washington may lead to possible clashes between the two countries, deeming a potential confrontation to be “not entirely out of the question.”

More than 100 countries defied President Donald Trump on Thursday and voted in favour of a United Nations General Assembly resolution calling for the United States to withdraw its decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital.The motion was adopted with a decisive vote of 128 to nine, with 35 abstentions.President Donald Trump had warned ahead of the vote in the 193-nation assembly that "we're watching" and threatened reprisals against countries backing the measure, which reaffirms that the status of Jerusalem must be resolved through negotiations.

Seven countries - Guatemala, Honduras, Togo, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau and the Marshall Islands - joined Israel and the United States in opposing the measure.

Russia ramped up its calls for the U.S. military to depart from Syria on Thursday, contending it has no substantial reasons to be in the country and its presence there "must end."“Any reasons cited by the Americans to justify their further military presence... are just excuses and we think their presence must end," Alexander Lavrentiev, Russian President Vladimir Putin's envoy to Syria, told reporters. Lavrentiev was in Astana, Kazakhstan, on Thursday ahead of peace talks regarding the Syria conflict between Russia, Iran and Turkey, Reuters reports. Russia, a major ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, has played a significant role in the Syria conflict. 

This is not the first time the Russian government has expressed such views in recent weeks. Russia seemingly feels the U.S. military has no purpose in Syria now that the the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) has largely lost its foothold in Syria and Iraq. The envoy's remarks also come after the U.S. and Russia have sparred over airspace in Syria. In mid-December, two U.S. warplanes in Syria were diverted from supporting ground operations against ISIS to intercept Russian fighter jets that allegedly crossed into U.S. coalition airspace. But the Pentagon has signified it has no plans to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria any time in the near future. "We are going to maintain our commitment on the ground as long as we need to, to support our partners and prevent the return of terrorist groups," Pentagon spokesperson Eric Pahon told Agence France-Presse earlier this month. "To ensure an enduring defeat of ISIS, the coalition must ensure it cannot regenerate, reclaim lost ground or plot external attacks," he added. There are currently nearly 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria, according to numbers from the Pentagon. Since the Syrian conflict began in 2011, it has claimed more than 400,000 lives, according to the U.N., and contributed to the worst refugee crisis since World War II. 

he General Assembly voted 176-7 on Tuesday to affirm the Palestinian right to self-determination, one day after Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas pledged to renew his quest for state membership in the international body.The vote is nonbinding and has no impact beyond underscoring international support for Palestinian statehood among most of the UN’s 193 members.

The United States, Canada and Israel were among the seven that opposed the text; four states abstained.While the General Assembly approves a similar text each year, PLO Ambassador to the UN Riyad Mansour said this year’s vote had to be seen within the context of international opposition to US President Donald Trump’s declaration that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.

It is one of a number of moves the Palestinians are taking at the UN this week to underscore their claim that Israel and the US are isolated on the world stage when it comes to the Israeli- Palestinian conflict.On Wednesday, the General Assembly will vote on a resolution stipulating the right of the Palestinian people to their natural resources in “occupied territory,” Mansour added. This includes the West Bank and east Jerusalem.But the PLO needs Security Council approval to become a UN member state, which means that the US can block its momentum.The PLO is seeking a way to circumvent the US; to date there are few UN organs that provide an alternative to a Security Council vote.The primary organ for neutralizing the Security Council is the General Assembly’s Uniting for Peace Resolution 377A, approved in 1950 to neutralize the Soviet Union’s power at the Security Council, which at the time was blocking action on Korea.Since then, the General Assembly has held 10 emergency session under Resolution 377A, half of which have been about Israel.The last one was opened in 1997 over Israeli construction in Jerusalem’s Har Homa neighborhood, located over the Green Line. Eighteen General Assembly meetings have been held under that session’s title.The last such emergency session was in 2009, regarding the IDF’s Operation Cast Lead against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Australian military aircraft will no longer fly combat operations over Iraq, the Defence Minister Marise Payne announced on Friday."The Australian government has determined we will bring home our six Super Hornet strike aircraft from the Middle East, marking the end of Australia's air strike operations in Iraq and Syria," she said."We can be immensely proud of the contribution our Hornet crews have made to the fight against Daesh. There's no doubt our air strike operations have made a difference."The Australian military's Air Task Group consisted of six F/A-18 fighter jets, an E-7A Wedgetail surveillance plane and KC-30A refuelling aircraft.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has made history today, when he endorsed the creation of a soon to be unveiled CryptoRouble, the world’s first cryptocurrency endorsed by a state. Russian monetary experts and political leaders have recently begun engaging in a debate which pitted monetary conservatives against monetary radicals. Most Russian officials agreed that allowing the use of western designed (though not western state endorsed) cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, was not compatible with Russian financial security concerns. China, for example, reached a similar conclusion about existing cryptocurrencies. In Russia, the debate then quickly evolved into to a question over what role if any, a government and central bank should have in respect of cryptocurrencies. Conservatives argued that the entire process of blockchain cryptocurrency technology should not be accepted as a legal alternative to traditional state issued notes, while radicals argued for the creation and regulation of a uniquely Russian cryptocurremcy. The radials have clearly won and appear to have been embraced by President Putin.

From: • H <hrod17@clintonemail.com > Sent: Saturday, September 3, 2011 10:28 PM To: Oscar Flores Subject: Fw: tick tock on libya PIs print for me.

To: H Subject: FW: tick tock on libya Here is Draft

Secretary Clinton's leadership on Libya HRC has been a critical voice on Libya in administration deliberations, at NATO, and in contact group meetings — as well as the public face of the U.S. effort in Libya. She was instrumental in securing the authorization, building the coalition, and tightening the noose around Qadhafi and his regime.

According to Russia’s Defense Ministry, the US State Department has finally admitted that the infamous Al Nusra Front, which controls Syria’s Idlib Governorate through the umbrella terrorist group HTS and is still thought to be a front for al-Qaeda, “not only has, but uses chemical weapons against civilians.” “The Hayat Tahrir al-Sham terrorist group (HTS), linked to Jabhat al-Nusra, which uses ‘small and heavy arms, improvised explosive devices, and chemical weapons’, operates in that province [Idlib]. This is the first official recognition by the [US] State Department not simply of the presence, but, I emphasize, the use of chemical weapons by Jabhat al-Nusra terrorists in that part of Syria to commit terrorist attacks, about which we repeatedly warned,” Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Konashenkov said. Igor Konashenkov also recalled that in Idlib province, “only one case of the use of chemical weapons is known — in Khan-Sheikhun.”

“However, the US accused government troops of [conducting] this chemical attack. And those who [actually] organized it, they called a “moderate opposition,” Konashenkov said.

US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said on Friday that he expected to see a larger US civilian presence in Syria, including contractors and diplomats, as the fight against Islamic State militants nears its end and the focus turns toward rebuilding and ensuring the militants do not return. The United States has about 2,000 troops in Syria fighting Islamic State. Mattis’ comments are likely to anger Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has previously called US troops “illegal invader” forces. “What we will be doing is shifting from what I would call an offensive, shifting from an offensive terrain-seizing approach to a stabilizing… you’ll see more US diplomats on the ground,” Mattis said. He has previously stated that US forces will stay in Syria as long as Islamic State fighters want to fight and prevent the return of an “ISIS 2.0.” This is the first time he has said that there would be an increase of diplomats in the parts of the country retaken from Islamic State militants. “Well when you bring in more diplomats, they are working that initial restoration of services, they bring in the contractors, that sort of thing,” Mattis said. “There is international money that has got to be administered, so it actually does something, it doesn’t go into the wrong people’s pockets,” he added. The contractors and diplomats would also be looking at training local forces to clear improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and holding territory to help ensure that Islamic State does not retake territory. “It is an attempt to move towards the normalcy and that takes a lot of support,” said Mattis. It was not clear how many US diplomats would serve in Syria and when. The United States has suspended diplomatic relations with Syria due to the civil war.

While the nearly seven-year-long sectarian “civil war” in Syria is widely believed to have started in 2011, revelations in recent years have shown that the sectarian war that has sunk Syria into chaos actually precedes the “official” start of the conflict. In 2010, Wikileaks published hundreds of thousands of classified State Department cables, including a 2006 cable showing that destabilizing the Syrian government was a primary goal of U.S. policy in the Middle East. The ultimate intention was to topple Iran, one of Syria’s closest allies. The cable revealed that the U.S.’ goal at the time was to undermine the Syrian government by any means available.

In addition, retired United States Army General Wesley Clark’s bombshell interview with Democracy Now exposed the existence of plans for regime change in Syria that date as far back as 2001. Now, a newly declassified document from the Central Intelligence Agency has shown that these regime change efforts date back even further to the late 1980s – and potentially even earlier

The declassified document was written in July, 1986 by the Foreign Subversion and Instability Center, a part of the CIA’s Mission Center for Global Issues, and is titled “Syria: Scenarios of Dramatic Political Change.” As the document itself states, its purpose is to analyze – in a “purposely provocative” manner – “a number of possible scenarios that could lead to the ouster of President Assad [Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez] or other dramatic change in Syria.” The report’s meager distribution list suggest it was considered by top officials in the Reagan administration, specifically because it was distributed to national security chiefs, not entire agencies. It was also distributed to a handful of key players in U.S.-Syria relations, such as former Ambassador to Syria William Eagleton.

The Israeli government has approved a plan setting aside $72 million to fighting the campaign to boycott the Jewish state. The plan, which would entail the largest monetary investment yet by Israel specifically toward combating the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, was announced last week to cabinet ministers and approved as an executive order after none of them objected, the Ynet news site reported Friday.

It calls for setting up a not-for-profit organization whose board will be made up of government officials and donors from abroad, the report said. The board will oversee the first major “civil-society infrastructure servicing the State of Israel and the pro-Israel community in the fight against the de-legitimization of Israel,” the notice sent to ministers read. The $75 million budget will come partly from the government and partly from Jewish donors and communities abroad, the report said. It did not say when the new organization would become operational or even established formally.

While such activities today formally fall under the purview of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, privatizing them would allow for quicker and more flexible action unconstrained by government bureaucracy and legal limitations on third party services, that require tenders when carried out by the government, the announcement explained. The new organization will, however, be subject to review by the state.

A changing-places moment brought about by Russia-gate is that liberals who are usually more skeptical of U.S. intelligence agencies, especially their evidence-free claims, now question the patriotism of Americans who insist that the intelligence community supply proof to support the dangerous claims about Russian ‘hacking” of Democratic emails especially when some  veteran U.S. government experts say the data would be easily available if the Russians indeed were guilty. One of those experts is William Binney, a former high-level National Security Agency intelligence official who, after his 2001 retirement, blew the whistle on the extraordinary breadth of NSA surveillance programs. His outspoken criticism of the NSA during the George W. Bush administration made him the subject of FBI investigations that included a raid on his home in 2007. Even before Edward Snowden’s NSA whistleblowing, Binney publicly revealed that NSA had access to telecommunications companies’ domestic and international billing records, and that since 9/11 the agency has intercepted some 15 trillion to 20 trillion communications. Snowden has said: “I have tremendous respect for Binney, who did everything he could according to the rules.”

I spoke to Binney on Dec. 28 about Russia-gate and a host of topics having to do with spying and America’s expanding national security state.

Bernstein: Your expertise was in the Soviet Union and so you must know a lot about bugging.  Do you believe that Russia hacked and undermined our last election?  Can Trump thank Russia for the result? Binney:  We at Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) published an article on this in July.  First of all, if any of the data went anywhere across the fiber optic world, the NSA would know.  Just inside the United States, the NSA has over a hundred tap points on the fiber lines, taking in everything.    Mark Klein exposed some of this at the AT&T facility in San Francisco. This is not for foreigners, by the way, this is for targeting US citizens.  If they wanted only foreigners, all they would have to do was look at the transatlantic cables where they surface on the coast of the United States.  But they are not there, they are distributed among the US population. Bernstein: So if, in fact, the Russians were tapping into DNC headquarters, the NSA would absolutely know about it. Binney: Yes, and they would also have trace routes on where they went specifically, in Russia or anywhere else.  If you remember, about three or four years ago, the Chinese hacked into somewhere in the United States and our government came out and confirmed that it was the Chinese who did it, and it came from a specific military facility in Shanghai.  The NSA had these trace route programs embedded by the hundreds across the US and all around the world.

Article 17 1. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation. 2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

declarations

JPMorgan Chase is set to pay a record $920 million to resolve probes from three federal agencies over its role in the manipulation of global markets for metals and Treasurys.The figure was released Tuesday morning by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in a statement from Commissioner Dan Berkovitz. Last week, news reports indicated that the New York-based bank was nearing a settlement of almost $1 billion.The penalty is a record for spoofing, which is when sophisticated traders flood markets with orders that they have no intention of actually executing. The practice was banned after the 2008 financial crisis and regulators have made it a priority to stamp out.Of the $920 million, $436.4 million is a criminal monetary penalty, $172 million is a “criminal disgorgement amount” and $311.7 million is for victim compensation, according to the Department of Justice.

JPMorgan Chase is set to pay a record $920 million to resolve probes from three federal agencies over its role in the manipulation of global markets for metals and Treasurys.The figure was released Tuesday morning by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in a statement from Commissioner Dan Berkovitz. Last week, news reports indicated that the New York-based bank was nearing a settlement of almost $1 billion.The penalty is a record for spoofing, which is when sophisticated traders flood markets with orders that they have no intention of actually executing. The practice was banned after the 2008 financial crisis and regulators have made it a priority to stamp out.Of the $920 million, $436.4 million is a criminal monetary penalty, $172 million is a “criminal disgorgement amount” and $311.7 million is for victim compensation, according to the Department of Justice.

The bank, the biggest U.S. lender by assets, has entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the DOJ that will expire in three years if the firm satisfies its obligations under the deal.