On January 3 Rear Admiral Viktor Bursuk, a deputy commander of the Russian navy who oversees weapons procurement, said Russia’s Navy is expected to receive 40 new warships and auxiliary vessels in 2014. In addition to surface ships of various classes, the Navy will also commission the third Borey-class nuclear powered ballistic missile submarine, the Vladimir Monomakh, and a Varshavyanka-class diesel electric submarine. Russia will continue the repair and overhaul of the Admiral Nakhimov nuclear-powered missile cruiser and three nuclear-powered attack submarines this year. The Admiral Nakhimov is expected to rejoin the Russian navy in 2018 with the most advanced weapons systems for its vessel type, the Sevmash shipyard said in June last year.
Category: Head Stories
North Korea has demanded South Korea and the US halt their annual military drill, calling it “a serious provocation.” If not, north-south relations “will plunge into a deadlock and unimaginable holocaust,” says Pyongyang. “We sternly warn the US and the South Korean authorities to stop the dangerous military exercises which may push the situation on the peninsula and the north-south ties to a catastrophe,” said the spokesman for the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea (CPRK) in a statement, reported [North Korea’s] KCNA state news. The US and South Korea, which have shared the cost of hosting American soldiers since 1991, are planning to stage military exercises late February. The annual drills such as ‘Key Resolve’ and ‘Ulchi-Freedom-Guardian’, staged by Seoul and Washington, focus on defending the South from attacks, including possible ones from the North.
Terrorism came into being as soon as humanity appeared, but the US special services turned it into a threat of global scale. The end of the 1970s can be considered as the starting point. Back then the Central Intelligence Agency launched a training program for «Islamic brigades» to entangle the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic into the war in Afghanistan. In 1998 Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote, «According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahedeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention». That was the time Osama bin Laden was recruited.
African immigrants demonstrate against racist policies of the Israeli regime. For more than six decades since its creation in 1948, the Israeli regime has hidden its crimes against native Arab people with the façade of “national security”. The Israeli usurpers have systematically stolen land from the native Palestinians, killed them, brutalized them, and pushed millions into exile or into squalid ghettos. Yet when charged with these blatant crimes against humanity, the Israeli regime defends its racist genocidal conduct in terms of security against “Arab terrorism”. It has gotten away with this despicable charade and affront to international law and morality in large measure because of the cynical indulgence of its patron in Washington.
The neoconservative Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), the successor organization of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), has just published another open letter (reproduced below) to Congressional leaders that implicitly endorses what I have called the “Kirk-Menendez Wag the Dog Act of 2013,” known officially as the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2013 (S. 1881). I say implicitly, because it doesn’t come right out and urge support for the specific bill, which AIPAC and the Israel lobby, for which AIPAC is the vanguard, are flogging as hard as they possibly can. But the intention is pretty clear. This letter — like PNAC, FPI is essentially a “letterhead organization” that issues manifestos, rather than a real think tank or grassroots membership organization — was signed by 72 “former U.S. government officials and foreign policy experts,” the vast majority of whom are easily identified as neoconservatives, as opposed to “conservatives,” the highly questionable term used by the Daily Beast’s Josh Rogin, who reported on the letter even before it was published on the FPI website to describe the signatories. (One wonders whether Rogin was given the letter on the condition that the authors be described as “conservatives” rather than “neoconservatives,” which really has become something of a dirty word over the past decade due to its association with the Iraq war and their enthusiasm over other ill-advised military adventures.)
Major media editors support what demands condemnation. Wall Street Journal editors are worse than most. They endorse Washington’s imperial agenda. They believe might makes right. On January 2, they headlined ”Victory in Okinawa,” saying: “…Japanese authorities will allow the US military to relocate an air base on the strategically significant island of Okinawa.” “Think of it as a triumph of democratic realism in the face of renewed regional threats.” America’s presence constitutes the most significant regional threat by far. Not according to Journal editors. They falsely accused China of “saber-rattling.” They want its “aggressive behavior deterred.” They claimed “nervous officials across Asia” want defense ties with America strengthened. Washington pressures them to do so.
Author and activist Noam Chomsky said that the congressional controversy over extending unemployment benefits is evidence that American politics has descended into madness. “The refusal to provide very minimal living standards to people who are caught in this monstrosity — that’s just pure savagery,” Chomsky said during an interview with HuffPost Live. “There’s no other word for it.” Chomsky is a leading American intellectual known at first for his academic work in the field of linguistics. He has since become an influential activist and progressive political thinker. HuffPost will be publishing excerpts from its interview with Chomsky over the next week. Republicans pursued food-stamp cuts last year, and blocked a deal to extend unemployment benefits during budget negotiations in December.
US top diplomat John Kerry must have taken us for fools. Earlier this week, speaking in Saudi Arabia, he warned that al-Qaeda in Syria and Iraq are “the most dangerous players in the region.” The US secretary of state vowed Washington’s support for the Iraqi government in its fight to regain control of towns in its western province taken over by militants belonging to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). That’s rich. The government of Syria is battling to root out these same al-Qaeda-linked militants. But in that country, Washington offers no such support. In fact, the priority there for Washington is to sack the government of President Bashar Al-Assad. So, how does Kerry square that contradiction? In Iraq, al-Qaeda is a threat that needs to be defeated, whereas in Syria the very same organization is apparently not a threat, but the Syrian government is.
JP Morgan Pays $2 Billion to Avoid Prosecution for Its Involvement In Madoff Ponzi Scheme JP Morgan: Ponzi Schemer Bernie Madoff has said all along that JP Morgan knew about – and knowingly profited from – his Ponzi schemes. So JP Morgan has agreed to pay the government $2 billion to avoid investigation and prosecution. While this may sound like a lot of money, it is spare sofa change for a big bank like JP Morgan. It’s not just the Madoff scheme. As shown below, the big banks – including JP Morgan – are manipulating virtually every market – both in the financial sector and the real economy – and breaking virtually every law on the books. Here are just some of the recent improprieties by big banks: Laundering money for terrorists (the HSBC employee who blew the whistle on the banks’ money laundering for terrorists and drug cartels says that the giant bank is still laundering money, saying: “The public needs to know that money is still being funneled through HSBC to directly buy guns and bullets to kill our soldiers …. Banks financing … terrorists affects every single American.” He also said: “It is disgusting that our banks are STILL financing terror on 9/11 2013“. And see this)
The events in Volgograd are part of a much larger body of events and a multi-faceted struggle that has been going on for decades as part of a cold war after the Cold War—the post-Cold War cold war, if you please—that was a result of two predominately Eurocentric world wars. When George Orwell wrote his book 1984 and talked about a perpetual war between the fictional entities of Oceania and Eurasia, he may have had a general idea about the current events that are going on in mind or he may have just been thinking of the struggle between the Soviet Union and, surrounded by two great oceans, the United States of America. So what does Volgograd have to do with the dizzying notion presented? Firstly, it is not schizophrenic to tie the events in Volgograd to either the conflict in the North Caucasus and to the fighting in Syria or to tie Syria to the decades of fighting in the post-Soviet North Caucasus. The fighting in Syria and the North Caucuses are part of a broader struggle for the mastery over Eurasia. The conflicts in the Middle East are part of this very grand narrative, which to many seems to be so far from the reality of day to day life.