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Germanwings crash investigation

BERLIN (Reuters) - The pilot who appears to have deliberately crashed a plane carrying 149 others into the French Alps received psychiatric treatment for a "serious depressive episode" six years ago, German tabloid Bild reported on Friday.

Prosecutors in France, after listening to the cockpit voice recorders, offered no motive for why Andreas Lubitz, 27, would take the controls of the Airbus A320, lock the captain out of the cockpit and deliberately set it veering down from cruising altitude at 3,000 feet per minute.

Citing internal documents and Lufthansa sources, Bild said Lubitz spent a total of one and a half years in psychiatric treatment and that the relevant documents would be passed to French investigators once they had been examined by German authorities.

Lufthansa Chief Executive Carsten Spohr told a news conference on Thursday that Lubitz had taken a break during his training six years ago, but did not explain why and said he had passed all tests to be fit to fly.

"Six years ago there was a lengthy interruption in his training. After he was cleared again, he resumed training. He passed all the subsequent tests and checks with flying colors. His flying abilities were flawless," Spohr said.

A Lufthansa spokeswoman said on Friday the airline would not comment on the state of health of the pilot.

(Reporting by Victoria Bryan; editing by John Stonestreet)

ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) — Nigeria's military claims it has destroyed the headquarters of Boko Haram in northeastern Gwoza town and driven the insurgents from all three northeastern states that had been an extremist stronghold. It was not possible to verify Friday's victory that comes the day before critical presidential elections.

Nigerian officials have said a multinational offensive aims to wipe out Boko Haram. Analysts and diplomats say that is overly optimistic and that they expect that Boko Haram will be dislodged from territory but still will be able to perform hit and run attacks and suicide bombings.

The military has been pursuing "a final onslaught" that has dislodged the insurgents from towns and communities in Adamawa, Yobe and Borno states, defense spokesman Maj. Gen. Chris Olukolade told a news conference Friday.

The first news came from the official Twitter account of the Nigerian Defense Headquarters, "FLASH: Troops this morning captured Gwoza destroying the Headquarters of the Terrorists self-styled Caliphate."

Olukolade said several fighters were killed, many captured, and a "massive cordon and search" operation has started to hunt down fleeing insurgents and any hostages. Defeated fighters are believed to be heading to the borders, where troops from a multinational force are preparing to engage them, he said.

Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau declared Gwoza the capital of a new Islamic caliphate after he seized the town in August.

There was no mention Friday of the Sambisa Forest, where Nigeria's home-grown Islamic extremist group is believed to have several camps. Warplanes have been bombing the area for weeks. The forest starts about 30 kilometers (20 miles) from Gwoza town, which is 130 kilometers (80 miles) southeast of Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state and birthplace of Boko Haram.

Nigeria's military, with support of troops and military aircraft from neighboring countries, in the past two months has retaken dozens of towns from Boko Haram. At least 10,000 people were killed in the Islamic uprising last year, more than 1.5 million people have been driven from the homes and unknown thousands have been kidnapped as sex slaves and conscripts.

“They have said, Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation; that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance. For they have consulted together with one consent: they are confederate against thee: The tabernacles of Edom, and the Ishmaelites; of Moab, and the Hagarenes; Gebal, and Ammon, and Amalek; the Philistines with the inhabitants of Tyre; Assur also is joined with them: they have holpen the children of Lot. Selah.” Psalm 83:4-8 (KJV)

IS THE A PRELUDE TO THE COMING PSALM 83 WAR?

The bible says that in the last days, there is a great Muslim confederacy created, a united army, that eventually comes against Israel as a group. So it is with great interest that we see today, in Egypt, an historic resolution drafted by Arab leaders to create a first-ever United Arab Muslim Armed Forces.

The agreement came after warplanes from Saudi Arabia and Arab allies struck Shi’ite Muslim rebels in Yemen on Thursday, in an effort to check Iranian influence in their backyard without direct military backing from Washington.

Arab foreign ministers speak together before meeting ahead of the Arab League Summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, in the South Sinai governorate, south of Cairo, March 26, 2015. REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh

“The Arab ministers agreed on adopting an important principle, which is forming the unified Arab military force,” Arab League Secretary General Nabil Elaraby told reporters after the meeting in the resort of Sharm El-Sheikh.

“The task of the force will be rapid military intervention to deal with security threats to Arab nations,” Elaraby added.

The draft resolution will be referred to the Arab leaders during their March 28-29 summit in Egypt.

Egyptian TV reported earlier that the ministers asked Elaraby to coordinate with Arab armies’ chiefs of staff within one month to begin forming the unified force.

The Arab league chief described the resolution as “historic”. source

BEIRUT (AP) — Syrian President Bashar Assad rejected allegations that his military had used barrel bombs or chlorine gas against opposition-held areas, calling the accusations "malicious propaganda."

In an interview with CBS News, the Syrian leader also said that he would be "open to a dialogue with the United States, but that it must be "based on mutual respect." CBS has published excerpts of the interview online.

The Syrian opposition and activists say government helicopters dropped bombs containing chlorine gas on the town of Sarmin in northwestern Syria's Idlib province on March 16, killing six people.

Videos posted online showed people struggling to breathe, and the international humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders said symptoms described by medics in contact with the group clearly indicate the presence of chlorine poisoning.

Assad dismissed the accusations, saying "this is part of the malicious propaganda against Syria" and suggesting the rebels were behind the alleged chlorine attack.

"It's not used as military gas. That's very self-evident. Traditional arms is more important than chlorine, and if it was very effective, the terrorists would have used it on a larger scale," he said. The government refers to its opponents as "terrorists."

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In this photo released by the Syrian official news agency SANA, Syrian president Bashar Assad, right …

The purported attack on Sarmin would be one of the most serious uses of poison gas in Syria since a deadly chemical attack outside Damascus in August 2013. In the fallout from that attack, Assad relinquished his chemical weapons program under a U.S.-Russian brokered deal, averting threatened American military strikes.

But activists and rebels have accused the government since then of carrying out several chlorine attacks on opposition-held towns and villages over the past year.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons OPCW has concluded "with a high degree of confidence" that chlorine was used on three rebel-held villages in Syria last year, killing 13 people. It did not assign blame. Last month, the OPCW condemned the use of chlorine in Syria as a breach of international law.

In the interview, Assad also addressed U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's recent statement that Washington must eventually talk with Damascus to help negotiate an end to Syria's civil war.

In principle, Assad said, "every dialogue is a positive thing, and we are going to be open to any dialogue with anyone, including the United States." He said there is no direct communication so far with Washington.

"I would say what we have in Syria so far is only a statement, nothing concrete yet, no facts, no new reality regarding the political approach of the United States toward our situation, our problem, our conflict in Syria," Assad said.

Washington has long pushed for a negotiated political settlement to Syria's conflict, which has killed more than 220,000 people and wounded 1 million. The U.S. helped coax Assad's government and its opponents to the negotiating table early last year, although those talks then collapsed after two rounds without making progress.

Since Syria's uprising began in March 2011, Assad's government has publicly supported international diplomatic efforts to ease or resolve the conflict, while simultaneously ignoring commitments it has made under brokered agreements.

In a separate interview with a group of Russian journalists, Assad lauded a Russian initiative to nurture talks between Syrian government representatives and the opposition in Moscow.

A first round of talks in Moscow in January made no headway. The main-Western backed opposition Syrian Nation Coalition shunned the meeting because it did not aim to remove Assad from power. The Coalition has said it will skip a second round of talks scheduled for next month.

"In order for this dialogue to succeed, it should be purely Syrian," Assad said, according to a transcript of the round table published Friday by the SANA state news agency. "In other words, there shouldn't be any outside influence on the participants in this dialogue."

Russia is a close ally of Assad, and has provided diplomatic support and weaponry to help the Syrian leader maintain his grip on power. Moscow also maintains a small naval facility at the Syrian port of Tartous on the Mediterranean Sea.

Asked about his country's ties with Moscow and the possibility of turning the Tartous facility into a full-fledged Russian military base, Assad said he would "welcome any expansion of the Russian presence in the eastern Mediterranean and specifically on the Syrian shores and in Syrian ports."

Did you know that the Russians have a massive underground complex in the Ural mountains that has been estimated to be approximately 400 square miles in size? In other words, it is roughly as big as the area inside the Washington D.C. beltway. Back in the 1990s, the Clinton administration was deeply concerned about the construction of this enormous complex deep inside Yamantau mountain, but they could never seem to get any straight answers from the Russians. The command center for this complex is rumored to be 3,000 feet directly straight down from the summit of this giant rock quartz mountain. And of course U.S. military officials will admit that there are dozens of other similar sites throughout Russia, although most of them are thought to be quite a bit smaller. But that is not all that the Russians have been up to. For example, Russian television has reported that 5,000 new emergency nuclear bomb shelters were scheduled to have been completed in the city of Moscow alone by the end of 2012. Most Americans don’t realize this, but the Russians have never stopped making preparations for nuclear war. Meanwhile, the U.S. government has essentially done nothing to prepare our citizens for an attack. The assumption seems to be that a nuclear attack will probably never happen, and that if it does it will probably mean the end of our civilization anyway.

Needless to say, the Russians are very secretive about their massive underground facility at Yamantau mountain, and no American has ever been inside. The following is what Wikipedia has to say about it…

Large excavation projects have been observed by U.S. satellite imagery as recently as the late 1990s, during the time of Boris Yeltsin’s government after the fall of the Soviet Union. Two garrisons, Beloretsk-15 and Beloretsk-16, were built on top of the facility, and possibly a third, Alkino-2, as well, and became the closed town of Mezhgorye in 1995. They are said to house 30,000 workers each. Repeated U.S. questions have yielded several different responses from the Russian government regarding Mount Yamantaw. They have said it is a mining site, a repository for Russian treasures, a food storage area, and a bunker for leaders in case of nuclear war. Responding to questions regarding Yamantaw in 1996, Russia’s Defense Ministry stated: “The practice does not exist in the Defense Ministry of Russia of informing foreign mass media about facilities, whatever they are, that are under construction in the interests of strengthening the security of Russia.” Large rail lines serve the facility.

Back in 1996, the New York Times reported on the continuing construction of this site. U.S. officials were quite puzzled that the Russians were continuing to build it even though the Cold War was supposedly over at that point…

In a secret project reminiscent of the chilliest days of the cold war, Russia is building a mammoth underground military complex in the Ural Mountains, Western officials and Russian witnesses say.

Hidden inside Yamantau mountain in the Beloretsk area of the southern Urals, the project involves the construction of a huge complex served by a railroad, a highway and thousands of workers.

Within the U.S. intelligence community, there was a tremendous amount of debate at that time regarding the purposes of this facility, but what everyone agreed on was that it was going to be absolutely massive…

A report in Sovetskaya Rossiya said the project involves construction of a railroad, a modern highway and towns for tens of thousands of workers and their families.

“The complex is as big as the Washington area inside the Beltway,” said an American official familiar with intelligence reports.

A couple of years later, a top U.S. general said that he believed that the complex at Yamantau had “millions of square feet available for underground facilities”…

A few years after that, in 2003, there was an article in the Washington Post by Bruce G. Blair in which Yamantau was mentioned as a potential key target for U.S. nuclear war planners…

Die-hard [U.S.] nuclear war planners actually have their eyes on targets in Russia and China, including missile silos and leadership bunkers. For these planners, the Cold War never ended. Their top two candidates [i.e., targets] in Russia are located inside the Yamantau and Kosvinsky mountains in the central and southern Urals.

Both were huge construction projects begun in the late 1970s, when U.S. nuclear firepower took special aim at the Communist Party’s leadership complex. Fearing a decapitating strike, the Soviets sent tens of thousands of workers to these remote sites, where U.S. spy satellites spotted them still toiling away in the late 1990s.

But the Russians have not just been building giant underground facilities deep in the Urals.

They have also been constructing thousands of new underground bomb shelters in major cities such as Moscow.

The following is an excerpt from an RT article in 2010…

Nearly 5,000 new emergency bomb shelters will be built in Moscow by 2012 to save people in case of potential attacks.

Moscow authorities say the measure is urgent as the shelters currently available in the city can house no more that half of its population.

In the last 20 years, the area of air-raid defense has been developed little, and the existing shelters have become outdated. Moreover, they are located mostly in the city center,which makes densely populated Moscow outskirts especially vulnerable in the event of a nuclear attack.

In order to resolve the issue, the city has given architects a task to construct a typical model of an easy-to-build shelter that will be located all over the city 10 to 15 meters underneath apartment blocks, shopping centers, sport complexes and parks, as in case of attack people will need to reach the shelters within a minute.

Of course all of this construction cost the Russians a lot of money.

One estimate put the cost at “anywhere from half a billion to a billion dollars”…

Though the bunkers are supposed to be designed to shelter the population in the event of a nuclear attack, government officials say it’s only a precaution and they do not expect such an attack or nuclear outbreak (e.g. Chernobyl) to occur. Neither RT or the Russian government provided estimates for the cost of the facilities. A Popular Mechanics article that reviewed a number of different types of bunkers and building practices had varying prices depending on the type of shelter. Since the proposed Russian bunkers would hold roughly 1000 people each (based on the population count and other details), one could estimate that the lowest price point for a bunker this size, with basic necessities like bathrooms and reserve food for a day or two, may run in the area of around $100,000 – $200,000. This would put a conservative price tag for 5000 shelters anywhere from half a billion to a billion dollars. A significant investment, indeed.

So what about us?

Has the U.S. government constructed any bunkers for the survival of the general population in the United States?

Of course not. In the event of a nuclear war, I guess they just expect pretty much all of us to die.

The Russians also recently finished work on a brand new national defense center in Moscow that contains extensive underground facilities…

Russia is launching a new national defense facility, which is meant to monitor threats to national security in peacetime, but would take control of the entire country in case of war.

The new top-security, fortified facility in Moscow includes several large war rooms, a brand new supercomputer in the heart of a state-of-the-art data processing center, underground facilities, secret transport routes for emergency evacuation and a helicopter pad, which was deployed for the first time on Nov. 24 on the Moscow River. The Defense Ministry won’t disclose the price tag for the site, but it is estimated at the equivalent of several billion dollars.

In addition, the Russians have also been developing a new anti-ballistic missile system that is designed to keep U.S. nuclear missiles from getting to their targets in the first place.

The U.S. doesn’t have anything like the S-500 that is currently being developed by the Russians. At the latest, it is scheduled to be deployed in 2017, but there are rumors that it is already starting to be deployed today. The following comes from military-today.com…

The S-500 is not an upgrade of the S-400, but a new design. It uses a lot of new technology and is superior to the S-400. It was designed to intercept ballistic missiles. It is planned to have a range of 500-600 km and hit targets at altitudes as high as 40 km. Some sources claim that this system is capable of tracking 5-20 ballistic targets and intercepting up to 5-10 ballistic targets simultaneously. It can defeat ballistic missiles traveling at 5-7 kilometers per second. It has been reported that this air defense system can also target low orbital satellites. It is planned that the S-500 will shield Moscow and the regions around it. It will replace the current A-135 anti-ballistic missile system. The S-500 missiles will be used only against the most important targets, such as intercontinental ballistic missiles, AWACS and jamming aircraft.

Sadly, most Americans are not interested in this stuff at all.

These days, most Americans just assume that the Russians are “our friends” and that a war with Russia could never possibly happen.

What they don’t realize is that the Russian people see things very, very differently. Today, 81 percent of Russians have a negative opinion of the United States. Our interference in the conflict in Ukraine has made the Russian people very angry, and there are many over there that now believe that a shooting war with the United States is inevitable.

And this week things between the United States and Russia got even more tense. Barack Obama has already announced that we will be sending “non-lethal” military aid to the Ukrainians, but now the U.S. House of Representatives has overwhelmingly passed a resolution that calls for Obama to send “lethal” military aid to the government in Kiev…

Yesterday, in a vote that largely slid under the radar, the House of Representatives passed a resolution urging Obama to send lethal aid to Ukraine, providing offensive, not just “defensive” weapons to the Ukraine army – the same insolvent, hyperinflating Ukraine which, with a Caa3/CC credit rating, last week started preparations to issue sovereign debt with a US guarantee, in essence making it a part of the United States (something the US previously did as a favor to Egypt before the Muslim Brotherhood puppet regime was swept from power by the local army).

The resolution passed with broad bipartisan support by a count of 348 to 48.

According to DW, the measure urges Obama to provide Ukraine with “lethal defensive weapon systems” that would better enable Ukraine to defend its territory from “the unprovoked and continuing aggression of the Russian Federation.”

“Policy like this should not be partisan,” said House Democrat Eliot Engel, the lead sponsor of the resolution. “That is why we are rising today as Democrats and Republicans, really as Americans, to say enough is enough in Ukraine.”

If Obama does decide to send lethal military aid to the Ukrainians, the Russians are going to flip out.

Sadly, neither side seems very interested in peace at this point.

We just continue to take even more steps along the road toward World War III, and it is a war that the United States is completely and utterly unprepared for.