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Sub Categories: » HOMEPAGE / WORLD/ MIDEASTSaturday,December 12 2015, Your time is 1:49:10 AMMIDEAST >Putin orders military to take tough action against threats in Syria MOSCOW - Agence France-PressePrint Page Send to friend » Share on FacebookRussian President Vladimir Putin addresses the audience during an annual meeting at the Defence Ministry in Moscow, Russia, December 11, 2015. REUTERS PhotoPresident Vladimir Putin on Dec. 11 ordered his forces in Syria to take tough action against any threats, speaking two weeks after Turkey shot down a Russian warplane in the war-torn country."I order you to act as tough as possible," he told a defence meeting in televised remarks.     "Any targets threatening the Russian grouping or our land infrastructure should be immediately destroyed."   "I would like to warn those who would once again try to organise some sort of provocations against our servicemen," he said in a thinly veiled threat to Ankara.

Putin's call for a tougher military response is also likely to cause concern among monitors who have repeatedly accused Russia of conducting an indiscriminate bombing campaign and killing civilians in Syria.   Russia has been carrying out air strikes in the war-ravaged nation at the request of President Bashar al-Assad since the end of September, while a US-led coalition is conducting its own campaign targeting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).      Earlier this week Russia said it hit IS targets with missiles fired from a submarine in the Mediterranean for the first time since launching the campaign on September 30.     Putin rejected claims that Russia is using the Syrian campaign, which also saw the military fire off cruise missiles from warships in the Caspean Sea, to showcase its top weapons to the West.   "Our actions there are not guided by some unclear abstract geopolitical interests, nor are they guided by a desire to practice and test new weapons systems which is of course important in itself," Putin said at the defence meeting.   "The most important thing is not this. The most important thing is to prevent the threat to Russia itself."   Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, for his part, said ISIL jihadists now control 70 percent of Syrian territory, putting their number at 60,000.

A leaked audio of a conversation between Venezuelan businessman, Lorenzo Mendoza, and former politician, Ricardo Hausman, has revealed Venezuela’s political and business opposition to be seeking collaboration with the IMF (International Monetary Fund) ahead of the country’s parliamentary elections on December 6th. In the phone conversation, leaked in Venezuela last Wednesday, both men speak about the possibility of IMF intervention in the Venezuelan economy and frequently refer to each other as “mate”.   Mendoza currently ranks as one the wealthiest businessmen in the world and controls key areas of the Venezuelan economy, such as the production of cornflour, beer and other household staples. Government supporters hold him responsible for the widespread shortage of key products, which they say is an attempt to destabilise the administration of current leftwing President Nicolas Maduro.   Hausman was formerly Planning Minister (1992-1993) to disgraced ex-Venezuelan President president, Carlos Andres Perez. He currently resides in the US where he is a lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. 

In the audio, which is dominated by Hausman, the ex-minister reveals that he is a longterm friend of the IMF’s Vice-president for the Western Hemisphere, who has asked him to go to the organisation to “talk about Venezuela”. He explains that the fund is “worried” that it will have to “intervene” in the country.   “The condition is that we have a small committee meeting to speak, gloves off, about what the hell we can do to see… Or, if you were to receive a call from Obama or Holland, or whoever and they say… Hell, mate, for us it’s really important that they get involved in Venezuela,” says Hausman.  The economist also assures Mendoza that he is committed to the “war in Venezuela” despite his absence, stating that “there is no exit for Venezuela without substantial international help,” appearing to reference the opposition’s violent street campaign to unseat the government last year, entitled La Salida (the exit).  Specifically Hausman recommends a 40-50 billion dollar loan from the IMF, which he says will entail a significant restructure of the country’s “debt profile” and “what they euphemistically term, private sector involvement”. The two men also reference a group of Hausman’s students in the US, who appear to have been pinned by both men to carry out the economic restructuring in a post-Chavista government.  The conversation finishes with Hausman revealing that he has “projects” in Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Albania, and confirming that the time is right for “carrying out an adjustment plan in Venezuela”. 

The recording has caused shockwaves amongst Venezuela’s citizens, who have widely rejected any IMF involvement in the country’s economics. The fund is largely held responsible by citizens for the country’s debt crisis in the 1980s, the economic turmoil of the 1990s, as well as for the riots known as the Caracazo in 1989 which led to widespread police repression and thousands of killings.  The IMF’s poisonous legacy in the country has led the country’s political opposition to distance itself publicly from the organisation. Nonetheless, its spokespeople have been consistently linked to the ill reputed fund over the past fifteen years of leftist government.  Earlier in February 2015, the political opposition led by Leopoldo Lopez, Maria Corina Machado and Antonio Ledezma, released a “Call for a National Transition Agreement” just days before the national government reported that it had uncovered plans for an attempted coup amongst the airforce.  “The Call for a National Transition” contained a number of points orientating the politics of a transitional regime in Venezuela, including selling off national public enterprises and the input of “international financial organisations”. 

In the first instance of a prominent politician taken down by the 11.5 million documents leaked in the Panama Papers, Iceland Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson resigned on Tuesday after fully 10 percent of Iceland's population rallied in protest of his wife's secret, offshore shell company holding millions. Gunnlaugsson was asked about the account on the day the leak was announced in a television interview, and he walked out rather than answer the question:

The next day, "an estimated 22,000 Icelanders slung eggs and protested outside the Parliament building" demanding his resignation, as Common Dreams reported. Gunnlaugsson initially refused to bow to the public pressure, but eventually announced his resignation on Tuesday evening.

News editor of the Reykjavík Grapevine Paul Fontaine said Tuesday, "While the Prime Minister's particular role in the Panama Papers leak is huge, and I don't want to downplay it, I also don't want to downplay the involvement other Icelanders—and the countless others around the world—also had in this." "This extends beyond the prime minister; it reaches parliament, it reaches Reykjavík City Hall, and it reportedly reaches hundreds of as yet unnamed Icelandic businesspeople," Fontaine pointed out. "The greater crime, which the Panama Papers illustrate comprehensively, is that we have a secret economy connected to and even supporting some of the worst aspects of the global capitalist system."

Following the attempt on Venezuelan Nicolas Maduro’s life with two explosive-laden drones on Saturday, the President promised to get to the bottom of the failed plot. Last night he showed that his government has learned some things at least, and Maduro says there is still more evidence to come. Prior to releasing the evidence, Maduro announced that he would be showing off what Venezuelan security had found late Monday night. According to Maduro at the time the evidence backed up the initial claims he had made right after the assassination attempt that “there is sufficient evidence of the participation of the outgoing Colombian government of President Juan Manuel Santos.” On Tuesday night Maduro presented the evidence to the people of Venezuela in a televised address. Much of what Maduro presented seems to confirm his conclusions and exposes a wider network of the forces plotting to end his life, and the Bolivarian revolution.

Late Tuesday night Maduro took to Twitter to announce that he would “be presenting strong evidence of the links that the Colombian oligarchy has with the events on Avenida Bolivar” in a few hours. In this post, Maduro promised that during his presentation that he would show that Venezuela’s security services “have the location, the names of the place in Chinacota Norte de Santander where they trained, the assassins, the terrorists,” and have also captured all those directly involved with the terrorist attack. Maduro’s final presentation late Tuesday shined even more light on the events of Saturday, including where the drone was controlled from. The Venezuelan Military also confirmed that the drones were stopped by signal jammers near the stage and that’s what caused them to crash and explode before reaching Maduro. According to Venezuelan intelligence, this attack was no one-off either, as the attackers had trained for months in the Colombian town of Chinacota, in the northern border province of Santander. According to Maduro, the assassination was originally planned for Venezuela’s Independence Day on July 5th but was delayed due to a lack of preparation. The military arrested two of the drone pilots minutes after the attack as well as four other conspirators in the days following the attempt on Maduro’s life. Two names of terrorists involved with the plot have been released so far, they are Rayder Russo, a resident of Colombia, and Osman Delgado, a resident of the United States. Earlier today, Venezuelan Attorney General, Tarek William Saab, said this list of suspectshas also grown since the attack to include another 19 individuals. According to the AG, many of these newly identified plotters are not actually in Venezuela so “The Public Ministry will send requests to the United States and Colombia for their cooperation to extradite those involved in this act.”

Former President Barack Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice ordered U.S. spy agencies to produce “detailed spreadsheets” of legal phone calls involving Donald Trump and his aides when he was running for president, according to former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova. “What was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Ms. Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates in perfectly legal conversations with individuals,” diGenova told The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group Monday. “The overheard conversations involved no illegal activity by anybody of the Trump associates, or anyone they were speaking with,” diGenova said. “In short, the only apparent illegal activity was the unmasking of the people in the calls.”

Other official sources with direct knowledge and who requested anonymity confirmed to TheDCNF diGenova’s description of surveillance reports Rice ordered one year before the 2016 presidential election. Also on Monday, Fox News and Bloomberg News, citing multiple sources reported that Rice had requested the intelligence information that was produced in a highly organized operation. Fox said the unmasked names of Trump aides were given to officials at the National Security Council (NSC), the Department of Defense, James Clapper, President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, and John Brennan, Obama’s CIA Director. Joining Rice in the alleged White House operations was her deputy Ben Rhodes, according to Fox. Critics of the atmosphere prevailing throughout the Obama administration’s last year in office point to former Obama Deputy Defense Secretary Evelyn Farkas who admitted in a March 2 television interview on MSNBC that she “was urging my former colleagues,” to “get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves the administration.”

Michael Doran, former NSC senior director, told TheDCNF Monday that “somebody blew a hole in the wall between national security secrets and partisan politics.” This “was a stream of information that was supposed to be hermetically sealed from politics and the Obama administration found a way to blow a hole in that wall,” he said.

Observing the presidential elections over the years has been a lot like watching a television series jump the shark. We've gotten to that point where you watch it for the same reason you can't help slowing down and staring as you pass a wreck on the highway. It's the Jerry Springerfication of politics. A morbid fascination with the decline of western civilization. I know. Some of you are on the train. Some of you are actually inspired by the smoke being blown up your collective backsides. I'm not here to burst your bubble. Not necessary. Reality will set in on its own time. No matter who gets inaugurated in January, the American public is going to come to their senses in a ditch, with a hangover and realize that they have no idea where their pants are. That's an ugly picture, but sometimes you have to hit rock bottom to realize you've got a problem. And there's never been a better time for a rude awakening. All around the world we are witnessing the early stages of a massive social and economic upheaval.

This week the Center for Media Justice, ColorOfChange.org, and New America’s Open Technology Institute filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission alleging the Baltimore police are violating the federal Communications Act by using cell site simulators, also known as Stingrays, that disrupt cellphone calls and interfere with the cellular network—and are doing so in a way that has a disproportionate impact on communities of color. Stingrays operate by mimicking a cell tower and directing all cellphones in a given area to route communications through the Stingray instead of the nearby tower. They are especially pernicious surveillance tools because they collect information on every single phone in a given area—not just the suspect’s phone—this means they allow the police to conduct indiscriminate, dragnet searches. They are also able to locate people inside traditionally-protected private spaces like homes, doctors’ offices, or places of worship. Stingrays can also be configured to capture the content of communications. Because Stingrays operate on the same spectrum as cellular networks but are not actually transmitting communications the way a cell tower would, they interfere with cell phone communications within as much as a 500 meter radius of the device (Baltimore’s devices may be limited to 200 meters). This means that any important phone call placed or text message sent within that radius may not get through. As the complaint notes, “[d]epending on the nature of an emergency, it may be urgently necessary for a caller to reach, for example, a parent or child, doctor, psychiatrist, school, hospital, poison control center, or suicide prevention hotline.” But these and even 911 calls could be blocked.

The Baltimore Police Department could be among the most prolific users of cell site simulator technology in the country. A Baltimore detective testified last year that the BPD used Stingrays 4,300 times between 2007 and 2015. Like other law enforcement agencies, Baltimore has used its devices for major and minor crimes—everything from trying to locate a man who had kidnapped two small children to trying to find another man who took his wife’s cellphone during an argument (and later returned it). According to logs obtained by USA Today, the Baltimore PD also used its Stingrays to locate witnesses, to investigate unarmed robberies, and for mysterious “other” purposes. And like other law enforcement agencies, the Baltimore PD has regularly withheld information about Stingrays from defense attorneys, judges, and the public. Moreover, according to the FCC complaint, the Baltimore PD’s use of Stingrays disproportionately impacts African American communities. Coming on the heels of a scathing Department of Justice report finding “BPD engages in a pattern or practice of conduct that violates the Constitution or federal law,” this may not be surprising, but it still should be shocking. The DOJ’s investigation found that BPD not only regularly makes unconstitutional stops and arrests and uses excessive force within African-American communities but also retaliates against people for constitutionally protected expression, and uses enforcement strategies that produce “severe and unjustified disparities in the rates of stops, searches and arrests of African Americans.”

Adding Stingrays to this mix means that these same communities are subject to more surveillance that chills speech and are less able to make 911 and other emergency calls than communities where the police aren’t regularly using Stingrays. A map included in the FCC complaint shows exactly how this is impacting Baltimore’s African-American communities. It plots hundreds of addresses where USA Today discovered BPD was using Stingrays over a map of Baltimore’s black population based on 2010 Census data included in the DOJ’s recent report:

Colombia will be part, starting next week, of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as the first Latin American "global partner", announced on Friday the president of that nation, Juan Manuel Santos. "We will formalize in Brussels next week -and this is very important- the entry of Colombia into NATO in the category of global partner, we will be the only country in Latin America with this privilege," the president said in a televised address from the presidential Narino Palace.

At that time, the neighboring government of Venezuela rejected the announcement as an "attempt to introduce external factors with nuclear capacity" in the region.At the beginning of 2017, the then Venezuelan Foreign Minister Delcy Rodríguez had denounced that with that entry Colombia could violate the Tlatelolco agreement, put into effect in 1969 with the purpose of establishing the denuclearization of Latin America and the Caribbean.In addition, Colombia is part of the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries (NAM) and one of the essential principles of the bloc states that its members "can not be part of any type of military and warlike organization such as the North Atlantic Treaty. "

Everyone always asks, If there’s not going to be a Palestinian state, what does Israel plan to do with all those Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem under its control? Here’s a visionary answer from an up-and-coming member of the Knesset from Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, Miki Zohar, speaking on Israeli television Sunday.

That’s right, this is Zohar’s vision, on the English language program The Spin Room. The two state solution is dead. What is left is a one state solution with the Arabs here as, not as full citizenship. Because full citizenship can let them to vote to the Knesset. They will get all of the rights like every citizen except voting for the Knesset. Journalist Ami Kaufman: Is that a democracy? Yes it is a democracy because they will get full rights and all the needs to get to prospect and to succeed here in this country. But they won’t be able to vote to the Knesset. But my idea is that we can let them to vote to the Knesset with only three things that they need to do like every other citizen. One, to go the army or to go serve the country, like everyone else here in Israel is obligated to do. Journalist Tami Molad: You want 2.5 million Palestinians serving in the Israeli army? I promise you, they won’t serve in the army, they will let go the option to vote. They won’t vote to the Knesset. They would prefer not voting and not donating to this country, believe me.

It’s astonishing to think that Miki Zohar, a lawyer and religious Jew of 36, thinks he has come up with a brilliant solution, when his answer is just as old as Jim Crow and apartheid and white supremacy. The good thing about his comments is that he is expressing openly what Israel has gotten away with for decades now, governing a people who are not granted the right to vote for their government. And yet our leaders call Israel the only democracy in the Middle East. Zohar’s comments are a lot like settler Yishai Fleisher’s view of Israel’s future, published without rejoinder by the New York Times two weeks ago, in which Fleisher also dispensed with the idea of a Palestinian state– and treated Palestinians as so much human matter to be moved around by Israeli shovels. These guys are helping to create Israel’s new global image.

The announcement today by Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman at the Knesset Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee, that the Trump administration warned Israel that imposing sovereignty over the West Bank would cause an “immediate crisis” between the U.S. and Israel, is spreading like wildfire. Newsweek reported the warning pointed to “a red line for the Trump administration in its relationship with the Israeli government”: “We received a direct message… imposing Israeli sovereignty [on the West Bank] would mean an immediate crisis with the new administration,” Lieberman told the Israeli parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. “The coalition should clearly state that there is no intention to impose [Israeli] sovereignty.” The warning came after Likud KM Miki Zohar, who advocates annexation, stated on Israeli television Channel i24 last night that the two state solution was “dead” and Palestinians, while not having full citizenship, would nonetheless enjoy rights like every citizen, except for the right to vote for the Knesset — unless they serve in the army or to “serve the country” which he hastened to assure viewers they would not do. Lieberman noted he’d been getting calls from “all of the world wanting to know if this is the position of the coalition,” continuing, “[W]e need to separate from the Palestinians and not to integrate them. The decision to annex Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] would mean the integration of 2.7 million Palestinians in Israel.” Rather confusing messaging from the Trump administration. Just last month Trump said he’d be “happy” with a one state solution “if Israel and the Palestinians are happy”. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley later walked that back, saying that the policy was still, two-state solution. Maybe Trump heard Palestinians are not happy. We may be hearing more on this latest development soon as Lieberman is due to meet with top U.S. administration officials this week in Washington.

South Korea’s Constitutional Court, on Friday, upheld the motion to impeach president Park Geun-hye. Acting Chief Justice Lee Jung-Mi read the ruling on the impeachment in a nationwide televised broadcast saying the Court’s decision by the eight justices was unanimous.

outh Korean law stipulated that the ruling has immediate effect – which means Park Geun-hye has been impeached and ousted from the presidency with immediate effect. She will be required to leave the presidential residence  – the Blue House – as soon as possible. A presidential election will be held in 60 days.

Since the December 9 adoption of the impeachment bill in the National Assembly, a total of 20 hearings had been held in the court. It took 92 days before the court’s final decision. Park will now possibly be subject to indictment and detention by prosecutors as she lost her presidential immunity following the court’s ruling. Prosecutors have identified Park as an accomplice of her longtime confidante Choi Soon-sil, who is at the center of a corruption scandal that led to Park’s impeachment for multiple charges including bribery, abuse of privileged information and nepotism. Having been impeached, Park will be stripped of most of the privileges granted to former presidents, including a monthly pension worth 12 million won or 10,400 U.S. dollars –  to 13 million won per month, one paid chauffeur and three paid secretaries. Free medicine and costs for a personal office will not be given to the impeached leader either. Moreover, the period during which she will have a special presidential security detail will be reduced from ten to five years.

The world's most wanted terrorist Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been killed in an airstrike, according to reports. Unverified reports from Syrian state television say the leader of Islamic State was killed in Raqqa.