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The UK Independence Party is a truly national force and has "momentum" behind it, Nigel Farage has said after its victory in the European elections. Hailing a "breakthrough" in Scotland and a strong showing in Wales, he said UKIP would target its first Westminster seat in next week's Newark by-election. Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has said he will not resign after his party lost all but one of its 12 MEPs. He said he was not going to "walk away" from the job despite the poor results. Mr Farage has been celebrating his party's triumph in the European polls, the first time a party other than the Conservatives or Labour has won a national election for 100 years.

The UK Independence Party is a truly national force and has "momentum" behind it, Nigel Farage has said after its victory in the European elections. Hailing a "breakthrough" in Scotland and a strong showing in Wales, he said UKIP would target its first Westminster seat in next week's Newark by-election. Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has said he will not resign after his party lost all but one of its 12 MEPs.

The UK Independence Party is a truly national force and has "momentum" behind it, Nigel Farage has said after its victory in the European elections. Hailing a "breakthrough" in Scotland and a strong showing in Wales, he said UKIP would target its first Westminster seat in next week's Newark by-election. Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has said he will not resign after his party lost all but one of its 12 MEPs. He said he was not going to "walk away" from the job despite the poor results.

But now that Mr. Netanyahu has won after aggressively campaigning against a Palestinian state and Mr. Obama’s potential nuclear deal with Iran, the question is whether the president and prime minister can ever repair their relationship — and whether Mr. Obama will even try.On Wednesday, part of the answer seemed to be that the president would not make the effort. Continue reading the main story Related Coverage Win in Israel Sets Netanyahu on Path to Rebuild and Redefine GovernmentMARCH 18, 2015 Palestinian Leaders See Validation of Their Statehood EffortMARCH 18, 2015 Netanyahu Soundly Defeats Chief Rival in Israeli ElectionsMARCH 17, 2015 News Analysis: Deep Wounds and Lingering Questions After Israel’s Bitter RaceMARCH 17, 2015 In strikingly strong criticism, the White House called Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign rhetoric, in which he railed against Israeli Arabs because they went out to vote, an attempt to “marginalize Arab-Israeli citizens” and inconsistent with the values that bind Israel and the United States. The White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, told reporters traveling with Mr. Obama on Air Force One on Wednesday that Mr. Netanyahu’s statement was “deeply concerning and it is divisive and I can tell you that these are views the administration intends to communicate directly to the Israelis.”

And with Mr. Netanyahu’s last-minute turnaround against a Palestinian state alongside Israel, several administration officials said that the Obama administration may now agree to passage of a United Nations Security Council resolution embodying principles of a two-state solution that would be based on the pre-1967 lines between Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip and mutually agreed swaps.Most foreign policy experts say that Israel would have to cede territory to the Palestinians in exchange for holding on to major Jewish settlement blocks in the West Bank.

Such a Security Council resolution would be anathema to Mr. Netanyahu. Although the principles are United States policy, until now officials would never have endorsed them in the United Nations because the action would have been seen as too antagonistic to Israel.Continue reading the main story “The premise of our position internationally has been to support direct negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians,” a senior White House official said. “We are now in a reality where the Israeli government no longer supports direct negotiations. Therefore we clearly have to factor that into our decisions going forward.”

Almost before the votes were counted in the recent Greek elections, battle lines were being drawn all over Europe. While Alexis Tsipras, the newly elected Prime Minister from Greece’s victorious Syriza Party, was telling voters, “Greece is leaving behind catastrophic austerity, fear and autocratic government,” Jens Weidmann, president of the German Bundesbank, was warning the new government not to “make promises it cannot keep and the country cannot afford.”   On Feb. 12 those two points of view will collide when European Union (EU) heads of state gather in Brussels. Whether the storm blowing out of Southern Europe proves an irresistible force, or the European Council an immovable object, is not clear, but whatever the outcome, the continent is not likely to be the same after that meeting.   The Jan 25 victory of Greece’s leftwing Syriza Party was, on one hand, a beacon for indebted countries like Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland. On the other, it is a gauntlet for Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, and the “troika”—the European Central bank, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—the designers and enforcers of loans and austerity policies that have inflicted a catastrophic economic and social crisis on tens of millions of Europeans.

The troika’s policies were billed as “bailouts” for countries mired in debt—one largely caused by the 2008 financial speculation bubble over which indebted countries had little control—and as a way to restart economic growth. In return for the loans, the EU and the troika demanded massive cutbacks in social services, huge layoffs, privatization of pubic resources, and higher taxes.   However, the “bailouts” did not go toward stimulating economies, but rather to repay creditors, mostly large European banks. Out of the $266 billion loaned to Greece, 89 percent went to investors. After five years under the troika formula, Greece was the most indebted country in Europe. Gross national product dropped 26 percent, unemployment topped 27 percent (and over 50 percent for young people), and one-third of the population lost their health care coverage.   Given a chance to finally vote on the austerity strategy, Greeks overwhelmingly rejected the parties that went along with the troika and elected Syriza.

Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein—now the third largest party in the Irish Republic—hailed the vote as opening “up the real prospect of democratic change, not just for the people of Greece, but for citizens right across the EU.” Unemployment in Ireland is 10.7 percent, and tens of thousands of jobless young people have been forced to emigrate.   The German Social Democrats are generally supportive of the troika, but the Green Party hailed the Syriza victory and Die Linke Party members marched with signs reading, “We start with Greece. We change Europe.”   Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi—who has his own issues with the EU’s rigid approach to debt—hailed the Greek elections, and top aide Sandro Gozi said that Rome was ready to work with Syriza. The jobless rate in Italy is 13.4 percent, but 40 percent among youth.

Buhari’s foreign policy is notable for its proposal to «establish a special relationship» with the BRICS countries, particularly with Russia. The new president also plans to complete the creation of a free-trade zone - the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) - and to introduce a common currency in those nations. He sees Nigeria as a leader of this association. (2)

On April 1, the election commission of the Federal Republic of Nigeria - a country with vast mineral wealth and a population of 185 million - announced that a new president had been elected, a professional soldier named General Muhammadu Buhari, who attracted nearly 54% of the vote, beating the incumbent president, Goodluck Jonathan. The new Nigerian president has a colorful history. In the 1980s he was behind a coup that forced out the democratically elected president, but after a year and a half he was himself overthrown during a takeover led by General Ibrahim Babangida. That was not Muhammadu Buhari’s first revolution. He took part in his first coup d’état back in 1966 when he and other generals ousted the military dictatorship of Aguiyi Ironsi.

On April 1, the election commission of the Federal Republic of Nigeria - a country with vast mineral wealth and a population of 185 million - announced that a new president had been elected, a professional soldier named General Muhammadu Buhari, who attracted nearly 54% of the vote, beating the incumbent president, Goodluck Jonathan. The new Nigerian president has a colorful history. In the 1980s he was behind a coup that forced out the democratically elected president, but after a year and a half he was himself overthrown during a takeover led by General Ibrahim Babangida. That was not Muhammadu Buhari’s first revolution. He took part in his first coup d’état back in 1966 when he and other generals ousted the military dictatorship of Aguiyi Ironsi.

I thought about that March night as the election results rolled in, as the New York Times forecast showed Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the presidency plummet from about 80% to less than 5%, while Trump’s fortunes skyrocketed by the minute. As Clinton’s future in the Oval Office evaporated, leaving only a whiff of her stale dreams, I saw all the foreign-policy certainties, all the hawkish policies and military interventions, all the would-be bin Laden raids and drone strikes she’d preside over as commander-in-chief similarly vanish into the ether. With her failed candidacy went the no-fly escalation in Syria that she was sure to pursue as president with the vigor she had applied to the disastrous Libyan intervention of 2011 while secretary of state.  So, too, went her continued pursuit of the now-nameless war on terror, the attendant “gray-zone” conflicts — marked by small contingents of U.S. troops, drone strikes, and bombing campaigns — and all those munitions she would ship to Saudi Arabia for its war in Yemen. As the life drained from Clinton’s candidacy, I saw her rabid pursuit of a new Cold War start to wither and Russo-phobic comparisons of Putin’s rickety Russian petro-state to Stalin’s Soviet Union begin to die.  I saw the end, too, of her Iron Curtain-clouded vision of NATO, of her blind faith in an alliance more in line with 1957 than 2017. As Clinton’s political fortunes collapsed, so did her Israel-Palestine policy — rooted in the fiction that American and Israeli security interests overlap — and her commitment to what was clearly an unworkable “peace process.”  Just as, for domestic considerations, she would blindly support that Middle Eastern nuclear power, so was she likely to follow President Obama’s trillion-dollarpath to modernizing America’s nuclear arsenal.  All that, along with her sure-to-be-gargantuan military budget requests, were scattered to the winds by her ringing defeat.

Clinton’s foreign policy future had been a certainty.  Trump’s was another story entirely.  He had, for instance, called for a raft of military spending: growing the Army and Marines to a ridiculous size, building a Navy to reach a seemingly arbitrary and budget-busting number of ships, creating a mammoth air armada of fighter jets, pouring money into a missile defense boondoggle, and recruiting a legion of (presumably overweight) hackers to wage cyber war.  All of it to be paid for by cutting unnamed waste, ending unspecified “federal programs,” or somehow conjuring up dollars from hither and yon.  But was any of it serious?  Was any of it true?  Would President Trump actually make good on the promises of candidate Trump?  Or would he simply bark “Wrong!” when somebody accused him of pledging to field an army of 540,000 active duty soldiers or build a Navy of 350 ships. Would Trump actually attempt to implement his plan to defeat ISIS — that is, “bomb the shit out of them” and then “take the oil” of Iraq?  Or was that just the bellicose bluster of the campaign trail?  Would he be the reckless hawk Clinton promised to be, waging wars like the Libyan intervention?  Or would he follow the dictum of candidate Trump who said, “The current strategy of toppling regimes, with no plan for what to do the day after, only produces power vacuums that are filled by terrorists.” Outgoing representative Randy Forbes of Virginia, a contender to be secretary of the Navy in the new administration, recently said that the president elect would employ “an international defense strategy that is driven by the Pentagon and not by the political National Security Council… Because if you look around the globe, over the last eight years, the National Security Council has been writing that. And find one country anywhere that we are better off than we were eight years [ago], you cannot find it.”

Such a plan might actually blunt armed adventurism, since it was war-weary military officials who reportedly pushed back against President Obama’s plans to escalate Iraq War 3.0.  According to some Pentagon-watchers, a potentially hostile bureaucracy might also put the brakes on even fielding a national security team in a timely fashion. While Wall Street investors seemed convinced that the president elect would be good for defense industry giants like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, whose stocks surged in the wake of Trump’s win, it’s unclear whether that indicates a belief in more armed conflicts or simply more bloated military spending. Under President Obama, the U.S. has waged war in or carried out attacks on at least eight nations — Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, and Syria.  A Clinton presidency promised more, perhaps markedly more, of the same — an attitude summed up in her infamous comment about the late Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi: “We came, we saw, he died.”  Trump advisor Senator Jeff Sessions said, “Trump does not believe in war. He sees war as bad, destructive, death and a wealth destruction.”  Of course, Trump himself said he favors committing war crimes like torture and murder.  He’s also suggested that he would risk war over the sort of naval provocations — like Iranian ships sailing close to U.S. vessels — that are currently met with nothing graver than warning shots. So there’s good reason to assume Trump will be a Clintonesque hawk or even worse, but some reason to believe — due to his propensity for lies, bluster, and backing down — that he could also turn out to be less bellicose.

Offering a first glimpse of the secret 12-nation “trade” deal in its final form—and fodder for its growing ranks of opponents—WikiLeaks on Friday published the final negotiated text for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)’s Intellectual Property Rights chapter, confirming that the pro-corporate pact would harm freedom of expression by bolstering monopolies while and injure public health by blocking patient access to lifesaving medicines. The document is dated October 5, the same day it was announced in Atlanta, Georgia that the member states to the treaty had reached an accord after more than five years of negotiations. Aside from the WikiLeaks publication, the vast majority of the mammoth deal’s contents are still being withheld from the public—which a WikiLeaks press statement suggests is a strategic move by world leaders to forestall public criticism until after the Canadian election on October 19. Initial analyses suggest that many of the chapter’s more troubling provisions, such as broader patent and data protections that pharmaceutical companies use to delay generic competition, have stayed in place since draft versions were leaked in 2014 and 2015. Moreover, it codifies a crackdown on freedom of speech with rules allowing widespread internet censorship.

n the wake of the murderous attacks in Paris, we can expect western heads of state to do what they always do in such circumstances: declare total and unremitting war on those who brought it about. They don’t actually mean it. They’ve had the means to uproot and destroy Islamic State within their hands for over a year now. They’ve simply refused to make use of it. In fact, as the world watched leaders making statements of implacable resolve at the G20 summit in Antalaya, these same leaders are hobnobbing with Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a man whose tacit political, economic, and even military support contributed to Isis’s ability to perpetrate the atrocities in Paris, not to mention an endless stream of atrocities inside the Middle East.

How could Isis be eliminated? In the region, everyone knows. All it would really take would be to unleash the largely Kurdish forces of the YPG (Democratic Union party) in Syria, and PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ party) guerillas in Iraq and Turkey. These are, currently, the main forces actually fighting Isis on the ground. They have proved extraordinarily militarily effective and oppose every aspect of Isis’s reactionary ideology. But instead, YPG-controlled territory in Syria finds itself placed under a total embargo by Turkey, and PKK forces are under continual bombardment by the Turkish air force. Not only has Erdoğan done almost everything he can to cripple the forces actually fighting Isis; there is considerable evidence that his government has been at least tacitly aiding Isis itself. It might seem outrageous to suggest that a Nato member like Turkey would in any way support an organisation that murders western civilians in cold blood. That would be like a Nato member supporting al-Qaida. But in fact there is reason to believe that Erdoğan’s government does support the Syrian branch of al-Qaida (Jabhat al-Nusra) too, along with any number of other rebel groups that share its conservative Islamist ideology. The Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University has compiled a long list of evidence of Turkish support for Isis in Syria.

And then there are Erdoğan’s actual, stated positions. Back in August, the YPG, fresh from their victories in Kobani and Gire Spi, were poised to seize Jarablus, the last Isis-held town on the Turkish border that the terror organisation had been using to resupply its capital in Raqqa with weapons, materials, and recruits – Isis supply lines pass directly through Turkey. Commentators predicted that with Jarablus gone, Raqqa would soon follow. Erdoğan reacted by declaring Jarablus a “red line”: if the Kurds attacked, his forces would intervene militarily – against the YPG. So Jarablus remains in terrorist hands to this day, under de facto Turkish military protection.

Venezuela’s opposition Democratic Roundtable (MUD) coalition has won Sunday’s parliamentary elections, winning some 99 out of 167 seats. The governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) won 46 seats in the new parliament. President Nicolas Maduro recognized what he described as the “adverse outcome” of the elections. 

The fine counting of votes has not yet been completed but the outcome of Venezuela’s parliamentary elections stands clear. The PSUV, founded by the late Hugo Chavez has lost the elections on Sunday, December 6, 2015. The MUD has won over the Chavista PSUV, which will result in a non PSUV dominated parliament for the first time in 15 years. The National Electoral Commission (CNE) registered a voter turnout of 74.25 percent which translates into about 19.4 million registered voters who have come to the polling stations and cast heir votes. One of the Democratic Roundtable (MUD) coalition leaders, Henrique Capriles used his Twitter account to state the “The results are as we have hoped. Venezuela has won. It’s irreversible”. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, for his part, conceded the PSUV’s defeat, stating “We are here, with morals and ethics, to recognize these adverse results”.

Maduro had previously signed a document, delivered to the CNE, assuring that he and the PSUV would recognize the outcome of the elections. Maduro would blame the outcome of the elections on a sustained economic war against Venezuela and intense foreign political interference. The new Parliament is scheduled to begin its five-years term in January 2016. The exact composition of the new parliament is at this point still unknown, even though fine-counting hardly can change the overall outcome.

The Greek election on January 25 will be the most important in recent memory. If the pollsters are proven correct, Syriza is poised to win by a large margin and this victory will end four decades of two-party rule in Greece. Since 2010 – and as a result of austerity measures – the country has seen its GDP shrink by nearly a quarter, its unemployment reach a third of the labour force and nearly half of its population fall below the poverty line. With the slogan “hope is coming” Syriza, a party that prior to 2012 polled around 4.5% of the vote, seems to have achieved the impossible: creating a broad coalition that, at least rhetorically, rejects the TINA argument (There Is No Alternative) that previous Greek administrations have accepted. In its place, Syriza advocates a post-austerity vision, both for Greece and Europe, with re-structuring of sovereign debt at its centre. How significant is this victory for Europe and the rest of the world? Comments range from grave concerns about the impact on the euro and the global economy to jubilant support for the renewal of the European left. For sure, Syriza is at the centre of political attention in Europe.

Of course, nobody knows if Trump will follow through on these promises if elected. Once in Washington, he could very well become just another lying politician. But right now, the last thing Yellen and her New World Order cronies want to do is take a chance on President Trump.They want to keep their unchecked power to create endless amounts of money out of thin air… to build and pop one financial bubble after another… all to redistribute from the little people to the elites… and destroy free-market capitalism in the name of state-manipulated Ponzi finance.We know that won’t change under Clinton. And maybe it won’t change under Trump. But you can bet central bankers don’t trust that business as usual will continue with Trump.So come the next Fed meeting in mid-September, expect a lot of sophisticated talk from Yellen about this or that economic item, assorted indecipherable mumblings and an army of TV talking heads lapping it all up as if an economic god had spoken.Just don’t hold your breath waiting for a rate hike… no matter what the economy’s doing.

The United States government has already declared that in regards to what it alleges to be a Russian cyberattack against the U.S. Democratic Party, the U.S. reserves the right to go to war against Russia. NATO has accordingly changed its policy so as to assert that a cyberattack (in this case actually cyber-espionage, such as the U.S. government itself perpetrates against even its own allies such as Angela Merkel by tapping her phone) constitutes an act of war by the alleged cyberattacker, and so requires all NATO member nations to join any cyberattacked NATO nation in war against its alleged (cyber)attacker, if the cyberattacked member declares war against its alleged cyberattacker. Excuses are being sought for a war against Russia; and expanding the definition of “invasion,” to include mere espionage, is one such excuse. But it’s not the only one that the Obama Administration has cooked up. U.S. Senator Mike Lee has asserted that President Barack Obama must obtain a declaration of war against Syria — which is allied with and defended by Russia — before invading Syria. Syria has, for the past few years, already been invaded by tens of thousands of foreign jihadists (financed mainly by the royal Sauds and Qataris, and armed mainly with U.S. weaponry) who are trying to overthrow and replace the Syrian government so that pipelines can be built through Syria into Europe to transport Saudi oil and Qatari gas into the EU, the world’s biggest energy-market, which now is dominated by Russia’s oil and gas. Since Syria is already being defended by Russia (those royals’ major competitor in the oil and gas markets), America’s invasion of Syria would necessarily place U.S. and Russia into an air-war against each other (for the benefit of those royal Arabs — who finance jihadist groups, as even Hillary Clinton acknowledges): Syria would thus become a battleground in a broader war against Russia. So: declaring war against Syria would be a second excuse for World War III, and one which would especially serve the desires not only of U.S. ‘defense’ firms but of the U.S. aristocracy’s royal Arabic allies, who buy much of those ‘defense’ firms’ exports (weaponry), and also U.S. oilfield services firms such as pipelines by Halliburton. (It’s good business for them, no one else. Taxpayers and war-victims pay, but those corporations — and royal families — would profit.)

The U.S. government also declares that Russia ‘conquered’ Crimea in 2014 and that Russia must restore it to Ukraine. The U.S. government wants Ukraine to be accepted into NATO, so that all NATO nations will be at war against Russia if Russia doesn’t return Crimea to Ukraine, of which Crimea had only briefly (1954-2014) been a part, until Crimeans voted on 16 March 2014 to rejoin Russia. This Crimean issue is already the basis for America’s economic sanctions against Russia, and thus Russia’s continuing refusal to coerce Crimeans to accept again being part of Ukraine would be yet a third excuse for WW III.

Hillary Clinton says “As President, I will make it clear, that the United States will treat cyber attacks just like any other attack.” She alleges that when information was unauthorizedly made public from Democratic National Committee computers, the cyberattacker was Russia. She can be counted as a strong proponent of that excuse for WW3. She’s with Barack Obama and the other neocons on that. She has furthermore said that the U.S. should shoot down any Russian and Syrian bombers in Syria — the phrase for that proposed U.S. policy is to “establish a no-fly zone” there. She makes clear: “I am advocating the no-fly zone.” It would be war against not only Syria, but Russia. (After all: a no-fly zone in which the U.S. is shooting down the government’s planes and Russia’s planes, would be war by the U.S. against both Syria and Russia, but that’s what she wants to do.) She can thus be counted as a strong proponent of those two excuses for WW3.

With the Supreme Court knocking down regulations with a wrecking ball, the FEC out of commission, and an election heating up that will likely redefine the term “big money,” there are few avenues left for regulation of American elections. And now, Congress is set to close one off.On June 17, the House Appropriations Committee passed 2016 Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill including a collection of provisions that ensure that the so-called “dark money” of elections—money that passes through supposedly non-political social welfare nonprofits, such as the Koch Brothers’ Crossroads GPS or the League of Conservation Voters, and is therefore free from disclosure—remains very much dark.Section 129 of the bill prevents the IRS from taking any action to investigate whether these social welfare groups are acting exclusively for social welfare; Section 625 prevents the SEC from requiring disclosure of political donations for publicly traded companies; Section 735 prevents a rule requiring that government contractors disclose their contributions to political groups, nonprofits, and trade unions.

Rules like these are aimed at preventing what some campaign watchdog groups refer to as the dark money system. Though Federal Election Commission regulations require disclosure of all donations to political candidates, 501(c)(4) groups—groups determined by the IRS to be for social welfare, not political campaigning, and exempt from taxes and donor disclosure—can be used as a workaround. Corporations and individuals do not have to disclose their donations to these groups, meaning that these groups can make donations to political campaigns using money donated by others without those original donors revealing it.An executive order requiring disclosure rules of this sort had been one of the last hopes for election watchdogs looking for a way to keep campaign finance under control in the coming election. This action by the House Appropriations—part of a large government funding bill for which passage will likely not hinge on such small sections—has left them even more enraged at the state of current campaign finance regulations.

Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories have been convulsed by a wave of escalating violence in recent days. The lethal tensions ratcheted up sharply last Thursday when a married couple, Jewish settlers from Neria in the northern West Bank, were shot and killed in a car in front of their four children near Beit Furik, allegedly by members of a five-man Hamas cell who were subsequently arrested. Two more Israelis were stabbed and killed in Jerusalem’s Old City on Saturday by a Palestinian youth, who was shot dead at the scene. On Sunday, an 18-year-old Palestinian was shot dead by Israeli forces in clashes near the West Bank town of Tulkarem. The mounting friction has seen attacks by settlers on Palestinians, clashes between Palestinians and Israeli security forces and attempted attacks continue. On Wednesday. there were incidents in Jerusalem, where a Palestinian woman stabbed an Israeli man who then shot and seriously wounded her in the Old City, the southern Israeli city of Kiryat Gat, where a Palestinian was killed after reportedly trying to seize a gun from a soldier and stabbing him, and when a female Israeli settler’s car was stoned near Beit Sahour, which adjoins Bethlehem, in an incident in which it appears other settlers fired on Palestinians, seriously injuring a youth.

On the Palestinian side, anger escalated earlier this week after a 13-year-old boy in Bethlehem’s Aida refugee camp was shot and killed by an Israeli sniper in an incident the Israeli military has claimed was “unintentional” as soldiers were aiming at another individual.

Jerusalem has remained tense now for almost a year. Most analysts blame the recent heightened tension on several factors. Key among them has been the issue of the religious site in Jerusalem known to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary, and Jews as the Temple Mount. A long-running campaign by some fundamentalist Jews and their supporters for expanding their rights to worship in the Al-Aqsa mosque compound on the Temple Mount, supported by rightwing members of Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s own cabinet, has raised the suspicion – despite repeated Israeli denials – that Israel intends to change the precarious status quo for the site, which has been governed under the auspices of the Jordanian monarchy since 1967.

The White House on Monday announced the imposition of new sanctions on various Venezuelan officials, pronouncing itself “deeply concerned by the Venezuelan government’s efforts to escalate intimidation of its political opponents”: deeply concerned. President Obama also, reportedly with a straight face, officially declared that Venezuela poses “an extraordinary threat to the national security” of the U.S. — a declaration necessary to legally justify the sanctions. Today, one of the Obama administration’s closest allies on the planet, Saudi Arabia, sentenced one of that country’s few independent human rights activists, Mohammed al-Bajad, to 10 years in prison on “terrorism” charges. That is completely consistent with that regime’s systematic and extreme repression, which includes gruesome state beheadings at a record-setting rate, floggings and long prison terms for anti-regime bloggers, executions of those with minority religious views, and exploitation of terror laws to imprison even the mildest regime critics. Absolutely nobody expects the “deeply concerned” President Obama to impose sanctions on the Saudis — nor on any of the other loyal U.S. allies from Egypt to the UAE whose repression is far worse than Venezuela’s. Perhaps those who actually believe U.S. proclamations about imposing sanctions on Venezuela in objection to suppression of political opposition might spend some time thinking about what accounts for that disparity.

That nothing is more insincere than purported U.S. concerns over political repression is too self-evident to debate. Supporting the most repressive regimes on the planet in order to suppress and control their populations is and long has been a staple of U.S. (and British) foreign policy. “Human rights” is the weapon invoked by the U.S. Government and its loyal media to cynically demonize regimes that refuse to follow U.S. dictates, while far worse tyranny is steadfastly overlooked, or expressly cheered, when undertaken by compliant regimes, such as those in Riyadh and Cairo (see this USA Today article, one of many, recently hailing the Saudis as one of the “moderate” countries in the region). This is exactly the tactic that leads neocons to feign concern for Afghan women or the plight of Iranian gays when doing so helps to gin up war-rage against those regimes, while they snuggle up to far worse but far more compliant regimes. Any rational person who watched the entire top echelon of the U.S. government drop what they were doing to make a pilgrimage to Riyadh to pay homage to the Saudi monarchs (Obama cut short a state visit to India to do so), or who watches the mountain of arms and money flow to the regime in Cairo, would do nothing other than cackle when hearing U.S. officials announce that they are imposing sanctions to punish repression of political opposition. And indeed, that’s what most of the world outside of the U.S. and Europe do when they hear such claims. But from the perspective of U.S. officials, that’s fine, because such pretenses to noble intentions are primarily intended for domestic consumption.

As for Obama’s decree that Venezuela now poses an “extraordinary threat to the national security” of the United States, is there anyone, anywhere, that wants to defend the reasonability of that claim? Think about what it says about our discourse that Obama officials know they can issue such insultingly false tripe with no consequences. But what’s not too obvious to point out is what the U.S is actually doing in Venezuela. It’s truly remarkable how the very same people who demand U.S. actions against the democratically elected government in Caracas are the ones who most aggressively mock Venezuelan leaders when they point out that the U.S. is working to undermine their government. The worst media offender in this regard is The New York Times, which explicitly celebrated the 2002 U.S.-supported coup of Hugo Chavez as a victory for democracy, but which now regularly derides the notion that the U.S. would ever do something as untoward as undermine the Venezuelan government. Watch this short video from Monday where the always-excellent Matt Lee of Associated Press questions a State Department spokesperson this week after she said it was “ludicrous” to think that the U.S. would ever do such a thing:

The figures are staggering. In what looks like a vast population transfer from a disintegrating Greater Middle East, nearly 200,000 refugees passed through Austria in September alone. About half a million desperate refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere have arrived in Greece since 2015 began (those, that is, who don’t die at sea), and the numbers are only expected to rise. Seven hundred children a day have been claiming asylum somewhere in Europe (190,000 between January and September 2015). And at least three million refugees and migrants from the planet’s war and desperation zones are expected to head for Europe in 2016. Under the circumstances, I’m sure it won’t surprise you that, once the first upbeat stories about welcoming European crowds had died down, the truncheons and water cannons came out in some parts of the continent and the walls began to go up. Nor, I’m sure, will you be shocked to learn that an anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim fervor is now gripping parts of Europe, while far-right parties are, not coincidentally, on the rise.  This is true in France, where Marine Le Pen’s virulently anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-European-Union National Front is expected to make significant gains in local elections this winter (and Le Pen herself is leading early opinion polls in the race for the presidency), while in “tolerant” Sweden a far-right party with neo-Nazi ties is garnering more than 25% of the prospective vote in opinion polls. In Poland, an extreme party wielding anti-refugee rhetoric just swept into power. And so it goes across much of Europe these days.

All of this (and more) represents a stunning development that could, sooner or later, reverse the increasingly integrated nature of Europe, raise walls and barriers across the continent, and irreversibly fracture the European Union, while increasing nationalistic fervor and god knows what else. In the United States, in a somewhat more muted way, you can see similar developments in what’s being talked about here as an “outsider” election, but is, in fact, significantly focused on keeping outsiders separated from insiders. (Just Google Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and immigrants, and you'll see what I mean.) Isn’t it strange how we always speak of the “tribal” when it comes to Africa or the backlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but never when it comes to our world? And yet, if these aren’t, broadly speaking, “tribal” responses, what are?

     In the last 24 hours the controversy over the planned speech by Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu to both houses of Congress on March 3 to rebut the president’s policy on Iran has blown up to a new level. Muted outrage over the invitation has turned into open rage. The opposition to the speech by major Israel supporters across the political spectrum, liberal J Street, center-right Jeffrey Goldberg, and hard-right Abraham Foxman, all of whom say the speech-planners have put the US-Israel relationship at risk by making it a political controversy in the U.S., has been conveyed to the Democratic establishment. The New York Times and Chris Matthews both landed on the story last night, a full week after it broke, to let us know what a disaster the speech would be if it’s ever delivered. So these media are acting to protect the special relationship by upping the pressure to cancel the speech. With even AIPAC washing its hands of the speech, it sure looks as if Israel supporters want an exit from this fiasco. Jettisoning Israeli ambassador Ron Dermer or cancelling the speech would seem like a small price to pay in the news cycle next to a spectacle in which leading Democrats are forced to line up against Netanyahu in Washington, even as they file in and out of the AIPAC policy conference and praise Israel to the skies.

n the last 24 hours the controversy over the planned speech by Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu to both houses of Congress on March 3 to rebut the president’s policy on Iran has blown up to a new level. Muted outrage over the invitation has turned into open rage. The opposition to the speech by major Israel supporters across the political spectrum, liberal J Street, center-right Jeffrey Goldberg, and hard-right Abraham Foxman, all of whom say the speech-planners have put the US-Israel relationship at risk by making it a political controversy in the U.S., has been conveyed to the Democratic establishment. The New York Times and Chris Matthews both landed on the story last night, a full week after it broke, to let us know what a disaster the speech would be if it’s ever delivered. So these media are acting to protect the special relationship by upping the pressure to cancel the speech. With even AIPAC washing its hands of the speech, it sure looks as if Israel supporters want an exit from this fiasco. Jettisoning Israeli ambassador Ron Dermer or cancelling the speech would seem like a small price to pay in the news cycle next to a spectacle in which leading Democrats are forced to line up against Netanyahu in Washington, even as they file in and out of the AIPAC policy conference and praise Israel to the skies. Here are the developments

NUMBER ONE: "Section One:   The Constitution of the United States shall be read and interpreted literally.   No words or phrases shall be changed or substituted and no part of the Constitution shall be used to expand or increase Federal Power or Authority beyond that EXPRESSLY granted and enumerated in the Constitution.   The language of the Constitution shall be interpreted according to the definition of words at the time of their inclusion in the Constitution. Section Two:    Congress shall have, by two thirds vote of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, the power to override individual rulings of the Supreme Court of the United States and/or subordinate Federal Courts.   The President shall not have veto authority over Congressional overrides of Federal Court decisions."

Israel’s prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has unequivocally ruled out the establishment of a Palestinian state as he vowed to strengthen construction of settlements in occupied east Jerusalem should he be re-elected on Tuesday. Netanyahu’s comments reinforced his hardening message of recent days and confirmed his final abandonment of his at best tepid commitment to a two-state solution designed to see the creation of an independent Palestinian state. His remarks were made in an interview with a website owned by US casino magnate Sheldon Adelson - Netanyahu’s biggest backer - and were being viewed by his political opponents as a last-ditch effort to sway voters away from the rival far-right Jewish Home party of Naftali Bennett.

“I think that anyone who moves to establish a Palestinian state and evacuate territory gives territory away to radical Islamist attacks against Israel,” Netanyahu said. “The left has buried its head in the sand time and after time and ignores this, but we are realistic and understand.” When asked if that meant a Palestinian state would not be established if he is elected, Netanyahu replied: “Indeed.” While his remarks will be seen in large part as election rhetoric designed to cement his standing with his country’s hard right at a time when Netanyahu has been struggling in his campaign, they will further strain relations with the US and other key allies should he win a third consecutive term.

The first significant step of the new administration comes while Trump is not even in offices. Obama, selfishly concerned with his historic legacy, suddenly makes a 180 degree turn and starts to implement Trump polices. Lets consider the initial position: Asked about Aleppo in an October debate with Clinton, Trump said it was a humanitarian disaster but the city had "basically" fallen. Clinton, he said, was talking in favor of rebels without knowing who they were. The rebels fighting Assad in western Syria include nationalists fighting under the Free Syrian Army banner, some of them trained in a CIA-backed program, and jihadists such as the group formerly known as the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front. The Obama administration, through the CIA led by Saudi asset John Brennan, fed weapons, training and billions of dollars to "moderate rebels". These then turned around (vid) and either gave the CIA gifts to al-Qaeda in Syria (aka Jabhat al Nusra) or joined it themselves. The scheme was no secret at all and Russia as well as Syria pointed this out several times. The Russian foreign Minister Lavrov negotiated with the U.S. Secretary of State Kerry who promised to separate the "moderate rebels" from al-Qaeda. But Kerry never delivered. Instead he falsely accuse Russia of committing atrocities that never happened. The CIA kept the upper hand within the Obama administration and continued its nefarious plans. That changed the day the president-elect Trump set foot into the White House. While Obama met Trump in the oval office, new policies, prepared beforehand, were launched. The policies were held back until after the election and would likely not have been revealed or implemented if Clinton had won.

The U.S. declared that from now on it will fight against al-Qaeda in Syria: President Obama has ordered the Pentagon to find and kill the leaders of an al-Qaeda-linked group in Syria that the administration had largely ignored until now and that has been at the vanguard of the fight against the Syrian government, U.S. officials said. That shift is likely to accelerate once President-elect Donald Trump takes office. ... possibly in direct cooperation with Moscow. ...U.S. officials who opposed the decision to go after al-Nusra’s wider leadership warned that the United States would effectively be doing the Assad government's bidding by weakening a group on the front line of the counter-Assad fight. ... Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and other Pentagon leaders initially resisted the idea of devoting more Pentagon surveillance aircraft and armed drones against al-Nusra.

Ash Carter is, together with John Brennan, the major anti-Russian force in the Obama administration. He is a U.S. weapon industry promoter and the anti-Russia campaign, which helps to sell U.S. weapons to NATO allies in Europe, is largely of his doing. He saw al-Qaeda in Syria as a welcome proxy force against Russia. But Obama has now shut down that policy. We are not yet sure that this is for good but the above Washington Post account is not the only signal: The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) took action today to disrupt al-Nusrah Front’s military, recruitment, and financing operations. Specifically, OFAC designated four key al-Nusrah Front leaders – Abdallah Muhammad Bin-Sulayman al-Muhaysini, Jamal Husayn Zayniyah, Abdul Jashari, and Ashraf Ahmad Fari al-Allak – pursuant to Executive Order (E.O.) 13224, which targets terrorists and those providing support to terrorists or acts of terrorism. ... These designations were taken in coordination with the U.S. Department of State, which today named Jabhat Fath al Sham as an alias of al-Nusrah Front – al-Qa’ida’s affiliate in Syria. ... Abdallah Muhammad Bin-Sulayman al-Muhaysini was designated for acting for or on behalf of, and providing support and services to or in support of, al-Nusrah Front. This is a major change in U.S. policy. Nusra will from now on be on the run not only from Russian and Syrian attacks but also from the intelligence and military capabilities of the United States. The newly designated Al-Muhaysini, a Saudi cleric, is Nusra's chief ideologue in Syria. Some considered him the new Osama Bin-Laden.

Syrian opposition figures and Gulf commentators dismissed on Wednesday a Russian draft proposal for a process to solve the Syrian crisis, saying Moscow's aim was to keep President Bashar al-Assad in power and marginalize dissenting voices.A draft document obtained by Reuters on Tuesday showed Moscow would like Damascus and unspecified opposition groups to agree on launching a constitutional reform process of up to 18 months, followed by early presidential elections.Russia, which with Iran has been Assad's top ally during Syria's nearly five-year conflict, has denied any document is being prepared before a second round of international peace talks in Vienna this week.The text, obtained by Reuters, does not rule out Assad's participation in early presidential elections, something his enemies say is impossible if there is to be peace."The Syrian people have never accepted the dictatorship of Assad and they will not accept that it is reintroduced or reformulated in another way," said Monzer Akbik, member of the Western-backed Syrian National Coalition."The Russians are now trying to play the game they have been playing since Geneva," he told Reuters, referring to United Nations-led peace talks that collapsed in 2014.