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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
3/16/2017 4:44:41 PM

The wildest Middle East peace process yet

Updated 2016 GMT (0416 HKT) March 15, 2017

Trump: I can live with 2 or 1-state solution 02:28
(CNN) Over the last two days, President Donald Trump's senior adviser on international negotiations and longtime lawyer, Jason Greenblatt, held meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian peace process -- now in a virtual coma.
The chances of the Trump administration waking the patient up, let alone facilitating a real road to recovery, are well ... pretty close to zero. Even Greenblatt opined he was in a listening only mode.
    Aaron David Miller
    Very little has changed in either the Palestinian or Israeli willingness to take risks on the big decisions required to sustain any kind of peace process that might move -- even over time -- to a two-state end game. Indeed, one of the results of the Netanyahu-Trump meeting in Washington was to call into question the whole premise of the feasibility and desirability of such an outcome.
    Still, there's definitely a new peace process conductor in town and a new tune, too, which has moved away from the one-note, two-state solution that has characterized US policy for almost 30 years. That approach may well be the least bad option for solving the Israeli-Palestinian problem. But, so far, it's proven unworkable.
    So does the Trump administration have a new approach? And can it work?
    Not Obama: A month in, one thing is stunningly clear. The Trump administration has so far rejected most everything its predecessor said and did on this issue. By this time in 2009, Obama had appointed a high-level special envoy. Then, in March 2009, Obama gave his now famous Cairo speech -- an unprecedented outreach to the Arab and Muslim world. And in perhaps a major miscalculation, he passed up an opportunity to visit Israel that year.
    Not in Trumpland: Elections have consequences. And on Arab-Israeli peacemaking we've seen some of the old, but mostly the new. The Trump administration, in questioning the value of a two-state outcome, has changed the US frame of reference; deescalated the settlements by making it a private rather than public conversation; and seems to believe it can quietly reach a set of understandings on the issue with the Israelis, which it can then sell to the Palestinians and Arab states in exchange for concessions.
    Enter the Arabs: Indeed, if there is a single significant change in the new administration's approach, it's the idea that the Sunni Arab states -- Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Emirates -- can be the drivers to entice the Israelis to the table and to support and pressure the Palestinians to come, too.
    One-state solution explained
    One-state solution explained 00:52
    This has been tried before without much success. But the new factor seems to be premised on the emerging mutual hostility both share toward Iran and Sunni jihadists. The question is whether this "outside in approach" -- making the Arabs a central actor rather than a supporting one -- will produce a happier ending.
    The new alignment between Israel and Arabs is real. What is less so is that these Arab states will reach out publicly to Israel and pressure Palestinians without substantial concessions from the Israelis -- including a settlement freeze and some political horizon promising a Palestinian state.
    Who's playing whom? Not too put too fine a point on it, but the Israelis, Palestinians and Arab states have their own agendas in Washington and are, to a large extent, playing the new guy in town. Netanyahu can't believe his good fortune. His visit to Washington strengthened him at home, certainly among the right; dodged and diluted the issue of Palestinian statehood; and the slap on the wrist on settlements during the presser with Trump only helped him domestically by giving him a talking point to restrain his most conservative MPs.
    Abbas is desperate, and his nice words about fighting terror and incitement after his meeting with Greenblatt have become pro forma. Given his deep unpopularityon the Palestinian street, he's in no position to make concessions without major ones from Israel.
    And the Arab states eager to be in Trump's good graces may be telling him much that he wants to hear. They are eager to solidify bilateral relations, in the case of the Saudis, for more US support in Yemen, and in the case of Egypt, to secure more military assistance.
    Bottom line? Is anyone really serious about the peace process?
    How serious is Donald Trump? And that applies to the President, too. During the campaign, he consistently spoke of his desire to try to take on the peace process, touting his negotiating skills and that of his son-in-law, the putative Middle East envoy Jared Kushner.
    I can only say I wish my father-in-law had as much confidence as Trump seems to have in Kushner. This is mission impossible or at least implausible. To make any kind of peace process real will require painful decisions -- even if a way can be found to temporarily bypass the big issues, like borders and Jerusalem.
    And it will take the personal involvement of a busy and easily distracted President.
    Still, I am looking forward to the moment when the Trump brand, applied to golf courses, ties, wine and steaks, is stamped on a peace initiative. I've seen the wild times on the peace process over the years, but this might well be the wildest.

    (CNN)

    "Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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    Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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    RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
    3/16/2017 5:24:38 PM
    Canadian Journalist Exposes Corporate Media For Reporting Syria Misinformation [Watch]




    Eva continues her campaign to end in the imperialist war in Syria and, in the meantime, continues to expose the hypocrisy and treachery of media outlets.

    By: Brandon Turbeville / Activist Post Ever since having utterly destroyed a smug mainstream journalist at a UN Summit over corporate media’s claims that they had sources inside East Aleppo, hospital bombings, and other “atrocities” committed by the Assad government, Eva Bartlett has been the subject of a corporate media smear campaign.

    Corporate media outlets and their NGO talking heads have maligned her as a “Russian agent,” a “Syrian agent,” and, probably the most ridiculous of all, even a racist (meaning white supremacist). This last one, of course, is a hallmark of the more NGO-funded or mentally handicapped SJW contingency, the usual suspects who compulsively make this accusation. The argument is that saying the alleged “revolution” of bearded jihadist freaks was funded and orchestrated by the West is to deny that Arabs have the ability to orchestrate their own subhuman revolution of savagery. (Yawn.)

    Still, this is quite a resume for a Canadian woman writing for alternative media outlets who can afford to pay very little for contributors (if at all) and traveling to places like Gaza and Syria on a shoestring budget in often rather unpleasant conditions. With Russia taking over the world and all, it’s surprising they couldn’t at least find better travel arrangements for one of their agents (or at least a .com domain! After all, the Russian hacking ability knows no limits, right?). It’s also odd that a white supremacist would find her life’s calling defending the rights of brown people against Western, largely white, nations. But I digress . . .

    The assertions made against her are so baseless and incredibly imbecilic that they do not warrant refutations, especially since her detractors will simply invent another attack when the current one no longer works. Today, a racist Russian/Syrian agent. Tomorrow an anti-white capitalist pig, perhaps. Only time will tell.

    But, despite the smear campaign, none of the corporate NGO attackers ever address a single claim she makes. Instead, they go right to accusations, over-talking, and name-calling. If her statements were so bogus, they would be easy to refute, right? Still, there is no debate, only catcalls. The reason for this approach is simply because each time one of the mainstream media drones or an NGO fanatic engages her in an actual debate, they end up getting their asses handed to them on internationally broadcast programs.

    Regardless, Eva continues her campaign to end in the imperialist war in Syria and, in the meantime, continues to expose the hypocrisy and treachery of Western media outlets.

    In a recent interview with Global Research Eva was asked to recount some of her experiences traveling in Syria. During the first few minutes of the interview, she managed to reveal to the world how mainstream media outlets like the BBCand New York Times were exposed to the reality of the situation in Syria yet absolutely refused to report what they saw. Instead, they reported a lie; i.e. the establishment line that Assad is “killing his own people” and that terrorist atrocities were simply unable to be given definitive attribution. At best, they qualified their reports with fantastical claims by pro-terrorist websites and organizations like the SOHR so heavily that the report itself seemed to “debunk” the actual truth of the matter.

    Bartlett stated,

    On a personal level, for example, in April, 2014, there was a mortar, at least one mortar which struck a school in Old Damascus. The school is called al-Menar and if I recall one child was killed and over sixty were injured. And I went to a hospital called the French Hospital with some others on this peace delegation I was in Syria with and we wanted to see who were the injured children, you know, to document them, share their stories, or at least share the fact that a school had been shelled by a militant in Jobar or East Damascus. And while we were there we ran into Lyse Doucet of the BBC. And she saw the same children. She could have asked the questions and deduced that the mortar indeed came from the militant area but her later report said something to the effect of “we don’t know where it came from.” That’s one instance.

    In November of last year, I was in Aleppo on my third of four visits to Aleppo and on November 3, there was a rain of GRAD missiles and gas canister bombs and explosive bullets and mortars onto civilian areas of Aleppo. By the end of the day, eighteen people had been killed and over 200 had been injured. And the journalists’ that I was with, from the New York Times, BBC, and other venues or other sites . . . we were at the Rasi hospital which is one of the main hospitals in Aleppo and we saw some of the injured coming into the hospital and we saw some of the corpses of those killed in these attacks coming to the morgue around the corner from the hospital. And in the piece the New York Times journalist later wrote – I don’t remember verbatim what she said – but it was implying that this kind of attack was unusual, where we’d been told, and anybody who researches even a little bit about Aleppo would know, we’ve been told that, on a daily basis, or near daily basis, the people of Aleppo were being attacked by mortars, gas canister bombs, etc. But, in her report, she couldn’t simply state what she had seen, she had to imply that this was somewhat unusual and she had to qualify it with an unsubstantiated report by the Syrian Observatory For Human Rights which is based in the U.K, and their allegation that some sort of attack had occurred by Syria or Russia the same day.

    . . . .

    The Western media will, in course, accuse the Syrian military and the government of massacres, of crimes against humanity, and, you know, they are both distorting the reality and ignoring the truth on the ground which is that the civilians in Syria have been suffering for years since this Western-instigated so-called revolution started in 2011. And Western media that reports on civilian deaths . . . civilian deaths do occur when the army is fighting terrorists. It’s a war. Civilian deaths will occur. But what the media ignores is the context. It ignores who funded these terrorists. It ignores the fact that Turkey and Israel have been attacking Syria and that this whole situation wouldn’t have occurred if the West, primarily Washington and its allies, hadn’t manufactured this notion of a revolution, hadn’t sent arms to the so-called rebels, hadn’t distorted the reality on the ground, hadn’t funded the so-called opposition.

    Indeed, the West’s involvement in Syria by its very nature puts the blood of every individual killed in that conflict squarely on the hands of the Western nations that engineered the crisis to begin with. Without the West, there would have been no “revolution,” no moderate cannibals, and no armed conflict whatsoever.

    But it is important to point out here that what Eva Bartlett witnessed was Western journalists who were clearly exposed to the same facts and incidents as herself to but who returned to their writing desks to report the opposite or, at the very least, something so skewed and misrepresented that it might as well have been a bald-faced lie.

    Others who have traveled to Syria have also found that their Western counterparts were reporting stories vastly different from their actual experiences.

    So while the mainstream media maligns Eva Bartlett as a Russian agent, the truth of the matter is that the corporate outlets are agents of disinformation and propaganda as more and more Americans are beginning to learn by the day.

    Despite having witnessed certain events on the ground, the reports of the New York Times and the BBCare coming back saying something entirely different. I suppose after helping lead an entire nation into a war based on fraudulent claims of “weapons of mass destruction,” you might as well commit and continue the lie.

    For those who have been following the Syrian crisis from the beginning, this is not a surprise. But as the corporate outlets continue to promote propaganda lines so far from reality, it necessitates greater and greater lies to cover up the initial treachery, thus devolving into catcalls of insults and suspicion such as claims of “Russian espionage,” “racism,” or other trendy buzz terms.

    However, since the corporate press and certain elements within the U.S. government are so obsessed with Russia, they would be wise to pay attention to the Russian proverb: “With lies you may go ahead in the world, but you can never go back.”





    "Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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    Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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    RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
    3/17/2017 10:27:14 AM



    US to Send 1,000 More Ground Troops to Syria
    March 16, 2017 at 7:57 am

    (ANTIWAR) Defense officials familiar with the situation say that the US will soon deploy another 1,000 ground troops into Syria, with the deployments expected to be part of the buildup ahead of the invasion of the ISIS capital city of Raqqa.

    This 1,000 troops is in addition to other recent deployments to Syria announced by the Pentagon, and when completed is expected bring the number of US troops in Syria overall to close to 2,000. The official US limit of the number of troops that can be in Syria is 503, a number long since surpassed.

    The exact timing of the new deployments is uncertain, but officials say it will likely be in the next few weeks. This deployment appears to be in excess to the 2,500 troops to be sent to Kuwait, which are expected to be drawn on by commanders in both Iraq and Syria to raise their respective numbers.

    While these recent deployments are a lot larger than the near-weekly announcements of new deployments during the Obama era, the fact that several deployments are being announced in close succession suggests the Pentagon has continued the trend of splitting the deployment into segments to avoid announcing the overall size in one shot.

    By Jason Ditz / Republished with permission / AntiWar.com / Report a typo




    "Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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    Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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    RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
    3/17/2017 10:47:53 AM

    Woman suffers burns after headphones catch fire on flight to Australia

  • Mar 15, 2017, 10:51 AM ET


    WATCHAirline passenger startled by exploding headphones

    A woman suffered burns to her face after the battery-operated headphones she was using on a recent flight caught fire, Australian safety officials announced Wednesday.

    The Australian Transport Safety Bureau did not say how severe the woman's injuries were, but she later told investigators that she heard a loud explosion while sleeping.

    The agency did not reveal the name, age or nationality of the woman.

    “As I went to turn around I felt burning on my face,” the woman was quoted as saying in a statement from the agency. “I just grabbed my face which caused the headphones to go around my neck."

    The woman threw the headphones on to the ground while they continued to spark and emit flames, she told investigators. A flight attendant soon appeared with a bucket of water to pour on the fire.

    The headphones were placed in a bucket at the rear of the plane.

    "The battery and cover were both melted and stuck to the floor of the aircraft," the agency said in the statement.

    Passengers would smell melted plastic, burnt electronics and charred hair for the remainder of the flight.

    “People were coughing and choking the entire way home,” the woman was quoted as saying in the statement.

    The ATSB concluded the batteries within the woman's headphones caught fire. The agency did not specify the type of headphones or batteries.

    The ATSB did not immediately respond to an ABC News request for more information on the incident.



    (abcNEWS)

    "Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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    Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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    RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
    3/17/2017 11:03:34 AM

    DELHI'S RESIDENTS CHOKE ON THE AIR THEY BREATHE AS POLLUTION LEVELS REACH AN ALL-TIME HIGH

    "Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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