- Where Childhood Obesity Is Most Prevalent In Europe
World Health Organization analysis shows the countries in Europe where childhood obesity is most prevalent, revealing, as Statista’s Martin Armstrong points out, that the problem to be most pronounced in Mediterranean nations.
Regardless of gender, Cyprus is home to the largest share of obese 6 to 9 year olds.
You will find more infographics at Statista
For boys, Cyprus is joined by Italy on the top spot with 21 percent. In third place is Greece with 20 percent.
For Europe’s girls, Spain has the second highest rate at 17 percent, followed by Malta with 15 percent.
- Swedish Anti-Extremism Tsar Allows Returning ISIS Fighters Re-Entry As "Caring Citizens"
Authored by Jon Hall via FMShooter.com,
According to officials in Stockholm, Swedish residents have nothing to fear fromIslamic State fighters returning from the Middle East to live peaceful, crime-free lives in Sweden.
Christina Kiernan, Stockholm’s anti-violent extremism coordinator, claimed that jihadists who returned from Syria and Iraq were living “orderly lives” following public outcry regarding the government’s decision not to strip people who fought in radical Islamic terror organizations of their Swedish passports.
Kiernan said on a television interview this week:
The IS returnees we have talked to so far have no known current crime, they have a job and an orderly life to the extent that we do not have knowledge of activities that can in any way scare anyone…
The television interviewer fired back:
So they are returning from this type of business and becoming caring, well-behaved citizens?
Kiernan admitted that “so far [the number of returnees they’ve spoken to] is only a few”. About half of the 300 ISIS fighters that left Sweden to fight in the Middle East are believed to have already returned to the country. Shockingly, a survey conducted last year reveals that local authorities have lost track of most of the returnees.
Magnus Ranstorp, terrorism expert, noted the “deep culture of silence” enacted in heavily migrant-populated areas of Sweden, with many citizens totally unwilling to speak to authorities over issues regarding Islamism or returning jihadists.
Ranstorp urged officials to keep a closer eye on returnees, warning that a “totally different threshold of violence” compared to the native population was a serious threat and that the government should do more to prosecute “extremely dangerous” individuals across Sweden.
Upon further investigation, it’s been exposed that one in three ISIS returnee fighters have committed serious crimes upon returning to Sweden.
Giving a new definition to the term “Stockholm Syndrome”, Swedish officials are openly contradicting themselves – claiming they’ve interviewed and talked with returning ISIS fighters to ensure they are living a peaceful, modernized life when it’s been reported they’ve lost track of the majority of them.
In their bid to reach total and complete political correctness, yet another European country is putting native citizens in real and actual danger to accommodate migrants with backwards beliefs that only want to terrorize Westernized societies and maim the infidels they’ve declared holy jihad on.
- Joint Russia-China Naval Drills Kick Off After 2 US Warships Enter Taiwan Strait
Early this week Chinese media confirmed that Russian warships arrived in Qingdao, a port city in East China’s Shandong Province, at the start this week’s join China-Russia naval exercises.
The Russian fleet included the Varyag guided missile cruiser, a submarine, two anti-submarine ships, a corvette, a landing ship, a tanker and a rescue vessel, according to China’s Global Times.
Russian submarine makes a visit to Qingdao Port in China. pic.twitter.com/FgMoWC0Bh9
— Andrew McAlister (@Drumboy44DWS) April 29, 2019
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The planned drills, called Naval Cooperation 2019 exercises, set to run April 29 to May 4 come amidst a general thawing and improvement of relations between Moscow and Beijing as both experienced heightened economic and military tensions with the United States of late.
For its part, the PLA Navy (People’s Liberation Army) will deploy a submarine, two guided missile destroyers, three guided missile frigates and a submarine rescue ship to participate in the exercises, according to an official PLA statement.
Prior file photo of PLA crew members aboard the Russian missile cruiser Varyag last year. via China Daily Official descriptions of the drills detail plans for joint training in maneuvering and communication, missile launches, artillery fire at sea, and naval aviation coordination, among other things.
Russia’s TASS news agency identified the ships in its fleet that are involved in the joint drills as follows:
A group of Pacific Fleet ships consisting of the flagship Guards Order of Nakhimov missile cruiser Varyag, the large anti-tank ships Admiral Vinogradov and Admiral Tributs, the corvette Sovershenny, the large landing ship Oslyabya, the rescue vessel Igor Belousov and the sea tanker Irkut arrived at the port of Qingdao on a business call several hours ago, and the official opening ceremony for the bilateral Russian-Chinese naval drills ‘Maritime Cooperation 2019’ was carried out.
Varyag missile cruiser, via TASS Interestingly, the joint drills kicked off a mere day after the United States sailed two warships through the Taiwan Strait. The USS Stethem and USS William P. Lawrence passed through the contested strait on Sunday, in what US Navy officials called “routine” transit.
“The ships’ transit through the Taiwan Strait demonstrates the US commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific,” Cdr. Clay Doss, a spokesman for the Navy’s Seventh Fleet said in in a statement. “The US Navy will continue to fly, sail and operate anywhere international law allows,” he added.
Beijing has consistently denounced such US operations as provocations aimed at weakening China’s historic claims over Taiwan.
- What If A Mega-Tsunami Hit The East Coast Of The United States?
Authored by Michael Snyder via The End Of The American Dream blog,
Someday a giant meteor will slam into the Atlantic Ocean, and the colossal tsunami that is produced will wipe out most of the people that are living along the east coast. In 1998, a big Hollywood movie entitled “Deep Impact” imagined what such an event would look like, and scientists assure us that it is just a matter of time before it takes place. And since 39 percent of all Americans live in a county that directly borders a shoreline, we are in an extremely vulnerable position. Let’s just hope that what I am talking about in this article does not happen any time soon.
Earlier today I was scrolling through my Facebook feed, and I came across a video entitled “What If A Mega-Tsunami Hit The United States”.
If you know me well, then you probably know that this is a hot button issue for me, and so it definitely got my attention.
And it must be a hot button issue for a lot of other people as well, because it has already been viewed more than 3.5 million times.
I did some digging around, and I found an accompanying article for the video. According to that article, someday a wall of water 3000 feet high could come racing toward us at 620 miles per hour…
In six hours, you, your government, and 124 million other people across 14 states will be tested by the greatest disaster to ever hit the U.S. East Coast. A great wave, 1000 meters tall (3280 ft.), moving towards you at 1000 km/h (620 mph), and that’s only the beginning.
Boston, New York, Philly, D.C., Miami. All underwater. And you?
Of course the size of the tsunami would all depend upon the size of the event that caused it.
According to scientists at the University of California at Santa Cruz, if a giant meteor suddenly slammed into the Atlantic Ocean it could potentially create a tsunami with a wall of water as high as 400 feet…
If an asteroid crashes into the Earth, it is likely to splash down somewhere in the oceans that cover 70 percent of the planet’s surface. Huge tsunami waves, spreading out from the impact site like the ripples from a rock tossed into a pond, would inundate heavily populated coastal areas. A computer simulation of an asteroid impact tsunami developed by scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, shows waves as high as 400 feet sweeping onto the Atlantic Coast of the United States.
Either way, we are talking about death and destruction on a scale that is hard to imagine.
Once a meteor hit, there would be a race against time to get away from the massive wall of water rapidly approaching the east coast. The creators of the Facebook video that I just mentioned envision that everyone would have “6 hours of advance notice”…
The death toll would be staggering; the economic impact, easily costing billions, if not trillions of dollars. It will take decades to rebuild, and yet, is it wrong to suggest that we might’ve gotten off easy?
How much worse would it have been without the 6 hours of advance notice? That’s right, you owe a big thank you to these supersmart buoys monitoring the coast, keeping you safe and dry, so that you can rest easy, and keep watching ‘What If.’
Sadly, the truth is that we would probably get very little warning. For example, if a giant meteor were to splash down near Puerto Rico, the amount of time before impact would be extremely limited. You could try to get in your car and outrace the wall of water coming at you at 620 miles per hour, but of course the highways would be jammed with other people trying to get out as well.
In a worst case scenario, tens of millions of people would die, and all of our east coast cities would essentially be destroyed.
You may not spend much time thinking about such a thing, but I find it very interesting that NASA is currently simulating a similar scenario…
NASA is going to be using a simulation of an “asteroid apocalypse” in order to help the space agency prepare for the cataclysmic event. And they are taking it seriously, as disaster planners from FEMA will join NASA for a dress rehearsal of doomsday.
International partners, including the European Space Agency (ESA), will also be a part of the simulation. The drill is said to be a “tabletop exercise” that will simulate just how a planetary asteroid emergency would play out in real time.
And NASA has good reason to be concerned, because our planet is apparently “in the midst of an epic asteroid surge”…
NASA’s been running these simulations for years, and with good reason: Earth, as it happens, is in the midst of an epic asteroid surge compared to the relative peace and quiet the planet experienced many millions of years ago.
When unexpected space rocks do appear on our scopes, sometimes we only get hours’ notice of their existence before they streak past. While the chances of a catastrophic impact are exceedingly slim, we’re nonetheless unprepared for surprise asteroid strikes, which is why NASA is continually working on plans to help improve our NEO detection and mitigation capabilities.
We truly do live in very strange times, and they are going to get a whole lot stranger.
A single moment in time can change everything. Most people assume that NASA knows about all of the big rocks that could potentially slam into our planet, but that is not true at all. According to one estimate, approximately 17,000 large near-Earth objects remain undetected. But since they are “undetected”, the truth is that nobody knows the real number.
Meteors go whizzing by us all the time, and NASA doesn’t discover a lot of them until they are already past us.
In reality, we are sitting ducks, and someday our luck will finally run out.
- Is The New World Order's Global Annihilation Agenda Ramping Up?
Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,
New World Order globalists are seeking to eliminate 90% of the human race, in a bid to protect the environment. Those for mass death have convinced themselves that the only way to save the planet is to eliminate “useless eaters.”
The NWO and globalization has been happening for some time now, but there always appears to be a moment when the agenda’s rhetoric is ramped up to disturbing levels, complete with apocalyptic death. Even leftist totalitarian comedians like Bill Maher have joined in the horrific agenda pushing by saying he just wants people to, “Not have kids, DIE, and stay dead.” Maher said humans hurt the environment, so the solution is for them to die. (Did Maher forget he’s a human?) “As he argued that humans hurt the environment, he concluded that it would be better for Earth for more people to ‘not have kids, die and stay dead,’” reports NewsBusters.org.
Leftists truly believe the planet will be destroyed if humans are allowed to survive much longer. Left-wing nut case Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warns that planet Earth only has 12 more years before it will be destroyed by “climate change” — a completely fabricated junk science narrative invented by power-hungry Leftists who are almost universally illiterate in the realm of real science, reported Natural News.
There are far too many humans who believe that the slaughtering and killing off of billions of other humans is the answer to “climate change.” Because globalists truly believe humans are a threat to the planet, they have no qualms whatsoever about calling for the mass genocide of human beings around the world. After all, they are trying to “save the planet,” they tell themselves, which translates in their twisted and sociopathic minds, that the ends justify the means. (Did anyone just picture Adolf Hitler?)
Natural News further wrote that the global annihilation agenda is ramping up, and with it comes increased rhetoric. In fact, laws are now being pushed that will allow governments to efficiently dispose of billions of bodies by “recycling” them back into the food supply. (Soylent Green, anyone?)
In the state of Washington, for example, a new “human composting” bill has been passed by the state House and Senate. Once signed into law, it would allow human corpses to be liquefied and flushed into the sewer system. From there, “biosludge” is collected by every city in America — including Seattle — where it is dehydrated and trucked out to the rural farms in surrounding areas. There, it’s dumped on farm fields after being dishonestly labeled “free fertilizer” for farmers.
This is all explained in my jaw-dropping film “Biosludged,” available for free at Biosludged.com. (You can watch the film, or even download the raw video files and share the files on torrents if you wish.)
Effectively, what this means is that human corpses are going to be “recycled” back into the food supply in Washington. Soon, this will be authorized across America. It’s one of the necessary steps before the globalists unleash their “kill switch” biological weapon that’s designed to kill off at least 90% of the global population. Once that is accomplished, human labor will be replaced by automated robots, while armed Google “suicide drones” seek out and exterminate the human survivors living in the rubble of cities like Seattle.-Natural News
All governments of the world are on an unsustainable path, and rather than admit failure and give up their power and money they’ve stolen from the masses, genocide becomes their answer. After all, those who are not living don’t need the government handouts. How else does anyone possible think universal basic income could ever work?
No one knows when the time will come that governments will decide to finally commit mass murder on a scale never before experienced, but there is evidence and even talk from globalists that it’s the only solution and at some point, could occur.
- Washington Warns Beijing: 'Paramilitary' Fishing Boats Will Now Be Treated Like Combatants
As the US continues its increasingly daring and extremely provocative “freedom of navigation” operations in the Strait of Taiwan and South China Sea, it’s also growing more vocal about challenging China’s increasingly expansionary military presence in the Pacific. Over the weekend, the US has warned Beijing that the US military would aggressively respond to provocative acts by China’s coast guard and fishing boats in the same way it reacts to the Chinese navy.
The threatening posture is aimed at curbing Beijing’s increasingly sharp-elbowed approach not just to the South China Sea, which it already effectively dominates, despite the rival claims of several of its neighbors (claims that have been validated by international courts), but in the Pacific more broadly, the FT reports.
Admiral John Richardson, head of the US Navy, said he told his Chinese counterpart, vice-admiral Shen Jinlong, in January that Washington would not treat Chinese fishing boats that work with the People’s Liberation Army-Navy any differently from actual Navy ships. This warning wasn’t unprovoked: On several occasions, Chinese fishing boats have blocked vessels belonging to the US, Vietnam and the Philippines. They have even rammed and harassed ships, blocked access to lagoons, and participated in the seizure of reefs and shoals.
“I made it very clear that the US navy will not be coerced and will continue to conduct routine and lawful operations around the world, in order to protect the rights, freedoms and lawful uses of sea and airspace guaranteed to all,” Adm Richardson told the Financial Times.
China’s informal marine militia has been expanding since 2015, when it established a headquarters on the Paracel Islands.
The maritime militia has been strengthened since 2015, when it created a headquarters in the China-administered Paracel Islands, a disputed area in the South China Sea that is also claimed by Vietnam and Taiwan. It has also received training alongside the Chinese navy and coast guard. In its last annual report on the Chinese military, the Pentagon said the fleet “plays a major role in coercive activities to achieve China’s political goals without fighting.”
China has increasingly used the maritime militia because fishing boats are less likely to prompt a military response from the US. But the latest warning significantly raises the stakes for China’s non-navy vessels engaging in aggressive acts.
Defense analysts have long warned about the need for a more effective strategy to counter Beijing’s expansionary aims in the Pacific, and Andrew Erickson, a maritime militia expert at the US Naval War College, recently called for the US to “deal with China’s sea forces holistically” by demanding that both military and paramilitary ships follow international rules. He added that the US must “accept some friction and force Beijing to choose” between de-escalating or inflaming tensions.
James Stavridis, a retired US admiral and former NATO commander, said Richardson made the right call.
“It is a warning shot across the bow of China, in effect saying we will not tolerate ‘grey zone’ or ‘hybrid’ operations at sea,” said Mr Stavridis. “A combatant is a combatant is the message, and the CNO (Chief of Naval Operations) is in the right place to warn China early and often.”
As is now customary whenever the US ratchets up the pressure on the Chinese Navy, don’t be surprised too see a retaliatory show of force in the coming days and weeks.
- Chinese Drugmaker Discloses $4.4 Billion Accounting Fraud
It looks like China’s unstoppable default tsunami is about to claim its latest corporate victim…and thanks to lax oversight that allowed the company to get away with what appears to be a staggering accounting fraud, thousands of unsuspecting investors might be left holding the bag.
According to Bloomberg, Kangmei Pharmaceutical Co., one of China’s largest listed drugmakers, revealed on Tuesday that it had overstated its cash holdings by $4.4 billion. Unsurprisingly, the revelation, which immediately exposed the company to be teetering on the brink of insolvency, sent its shares and bonds tumbling. Its shares, which are a constituent of MSCI’s global index, plunged by the 10% daily limit. Its 2.4 billion yuan ($356 million) notes due in 2022 dropped by as much as 60 yuan (about $9).
It’s just the latest example of why investors must be wary of Chinese companies due to lax regulations, even as its equity and bond markets are becoming increasingly internationalized. The company’s revelation came four months after it revealed that Chinese authorities had launched an investigation into the company.
One of BBG’s sources said the restatement is ‘unprecedented’ in the history of Chinese security markets.
The immense size of Kangmei’s restatement, described by one securities lawyer as unprecedented for China, puts a spotlight on disclosure practices in a country where companies are defaulting at a record pace and several instances of questionable accounting have emerged in recent months. The issue has become increasingly important for global investors and securities firms as they gain unprecedented access to China’s gargantuan stock and bond markets.
“Investors have to be more careful about Chinese firms’ reporting,” said Andrew Lam, a director at BDO, an international accounting firm. “They will have to do real homework, examining closely companies’ financial reporting for any potential irregularities.”
The China Securities Regulatory Commission, which in recent years has been pushing the nation’s stock exchanges to delist companies that provide inaccurate disclosures, didn’t immediately reply to a faxed request for comment. The Shanghai Composite Index rose 0.5 percent at 1:36 p.m. local time.
Though the company could face de-listing over the fraud, it said it will try and raise more capital to meet an upcoming bond obligation due Sept. 3. All of this is happening after Beijing’s decision to start allowing companies to fail led to a record number of Chinese corporate defaults.
Kangmei, based in China’s southern Guangdong province, said it faces forced delisting if the CSRC classifies its behavior as a major legal violation, according to a company notice on risks related to its ongoing CSRC investigation. The drugmaker’s upcoming bond maturities include a 750 million yuan note due Sept. 3. Kangmei plans to sell as much as 20 billion yuan of bonds to replenish working capital and repay debt, the firm said in a filing on Tuesday.
Other companies that have faced similar scrutiny from regulators include Kangde Xin Composite Material Group Co., which defaulted on a bond in January after reporting cash levels just four months earlier that were enough to pay the debt 15 times over. The CSRC began investigating Kangde Xin in October.
But as one analyst points out, this isn’t the first time a Chinese company has displayed a high cash balance while selling bonds, then the cash just disappeared.
“We have seen a number of Chinese companies with high cash balances still seek funding from investors, and later on the cash just disappears,” said Raymond Chia, head of credit research for Asia excluding Japan at Schroder Investment Management Ltd. “We should really question borrowers.”
While investors will be watching the CSRC, one of China’s most powerful securities regulators, to see how it handles the case, whatever the result, one investor said the Kangmei will likely ‘struggle to win back the confidence of investors’ – which sounds to us like the understatement of the century.
Investors will watch the CSRC for more details on what went wrong at Kangmei, according to Guo Feng, head of the wealth management department at Northeast Securities Co. Whatever the result, the company may struggle to win back investor confidence, said Shen Chen, a partner at Shanghai Maoliang Investment Management.
“This scandal could narrow their refinancing channels as investors flee,” Shen said.
Though BBG reported that this was the largest cash discrepancy on record, a bankruptcy from earlier this year suggests that this might not be true.
Back in January, the bankruptcy of Jiangsu-based Kangde Xin Composite Material Group, took investors by surprise when it failed to pay a 1 billion yuan ($148 million) local note due Jan. 15 due to a liquidity crunch, according to the company. The shocking punchline? As research analyst Tim Yup pointed out, as of end-September Kangde Xin reported that it had 15.4 billion yuan in cash and equivalents, more than double the total amount of its short-term debt, and more than 15 times the amount of debt that it just defaulted on.
Clearly, when it comes to the balance sheets of indebted Chinese companies, no cash balances can be taken as a certainty.
- About That Letter That Mueller Wrote To Barr…
Another deep state “leak” has hit the tape, and as usual it has gone to the WaPo and NYT almost at the exact same time… but this it’s even more laughable than usual.
In what the WaPo breathlessly reports late on Tuesday was a rebuke and “complaint” to Attorney General William Barr, special counsel Robert Mueller sent a letter to the AG in late March, just days after Barr sent out his summary to Congress, in which Mueller stated that Barr’s 4-page summary to Congress on the sweeping Russia investigation failed to “fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of Mueller’s work and conclusions, citing a copy of the letter it had obtained using its trusted deep intel sources.
This is what Mueller said to Barr, according to the leaked NSA intercept:
“There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”
And if one reads just that, it certainly does not look good for Attorney General Barr, especially just one day before his first official Congressional hearing on the topic of the Mueller report: so bad that even the absolute lunatic fringe of conspiracygate – which had mercifully shut up for the past month with its daily predictions that this member of the Trump clan is going to jail, or that website will be shut down – has roared back into life with the sage assessment that “this is bad.”
Pouring more fuel on the fire, the always pithy Axios adds that “this revelation about Mueller’s dissatisfaction with the characterization of his report will likely escalate the growing rift over Barr’s handling of the special counsel’s investigation. House Democrats, who have expressed distrust in the attorney general, are set to vote on Wednesday to allow House Judiciary Committee lawyers to question Barr at Thursday’s hearing.”
Or maybe not, and perhaps the WaPo/NYT report is not “so bad” if one actually reads it, because once the breathless WaPo finally does come up for air, we get to paragraph 13 – a point by which most readers have turned out – to read the following real punchline in the WaPo report:
When Barr pressed Mueller on whether he thought Barr’s memo to Congress was inaccurate, Mueller said he did not…
So, Mueller felt there was confusion… but he did not think the memo was inaccurate. Wait, what’s going on here and how is this even a story? Well, if we read the rest of the above sentence, we find the true object of Mueller’s “complaint”:
[Mueller] felt that the media coverage of it was misinterpreting the investigation, officials said.
Which means that, as the WaPo itself reports, what Mueller was really angry with was the coverage of his report by media such as… the WaPo and the NYT?? The irony, it burns.
But wait, because if one reads even further – and yes, we know most Russiagaters have troubles getting beyond sentence one so they are excused – we find that throughout a subsequent 15 minutes telephone conversation between the special counsel and the attorney general, Mueller’s main worry was “that the public was not getting an accurate understanding of the obstruction investigation.”
This goes back to what Mueller’s letter requested: “that Barr release the 448-page report’s introductions and executive summaries, and made some initial suggested redactions for doing so, according to Justice Department officials,” the WaPo writes.
What happened then? A few weeks later Barr did just that, and absent occasional redactions – some of which apparently revealed that Russia had taped Bill Clinton having phone sex with Monica Lewinsky – he did just that.
So if Mueller thought Barr’s memo was not inaccurate, and his ire was instead targeted at the media for “misinterpreting the investigation” – although it remains unclear just how they did this, after all Mueller does not dispute that there was no collusion (yes, Russiagaters, that means you) and did not dispute Barr’s conclusion of no obstruction – then what is the point of these two rather confused pieces? Well, as noted above, tomorrow Barr is scheduled to testify on Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the investigation, and the entire article is meant to focus on the headlines of the WaPo (and NYT) article, and certainly not on paragraph 13 which, not only refutes the prevailing tone that Barr did something wrong, but in fact exonerates him. But that won’t have any impact on tomorrow’s hearing which is now assured to be a complete kangaroo court.
As for tonight’s really big, if unspoken, story – if this is the best leak Mueller has to defy Barr and the president, then Trump has indeed won.
- 'Good Will'-Hunting By Iran & North Korea
When all else fails with Donald Trump try flattery. That’s exactly what Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif did on Sunday. Because for Iran and North Korea that is, honestly, all that is left.
First it was North Korea, saying talks could resume but only if President Trump’s staff were no longer around.
This weekend Iran took to the airwaves with an interview on Trump’s favorite network, Fox, likely the only thing he’s allowed to watch along with CNN. Good cop/bad cop as it were.
Zarif made his way around the Sunday talk show circuit to make his case to the U.S. establishment. These appeals were to Trump himself to come out from behind his staff and broker honestly with both countries.
“They have all shown an interest in dragging the United States into a conflict. I do not believe that President Trump wants to do that, I believe President Trump ran on a campaign promise of not bringing the United States into another war. But I believe President Trump’s intention to put pressure, the policy of maximum pressure on Iran in order to bring Iran to its knees so that we would succumb to pressure, is doomed to failure.”
IRANIAN FOREIGN MINISTER JAVAD ZARIF ON FOX NEWS SUNDAY
At the same time Iran and North Korea both understand that if Trump doesn’t do this they are moving on with their lives regardless of what the U.S. does next.
Russia is openly preparing for war if need be.
Since the beginning of the Trump administration there has been almost zero interaction between U.S. and Iranian foreign offices. The lack of diplomacy and professionalism of the Trump administration has been quite evident from the beginning.
Any attempt to engage in diplomacy was roundly rejected by Trump himself. Why do you think Rex Tillerson was fired? It wasn’t because he called Trump an “Idiot.” Though Rex was right about that.
He was fired because he actually engaged in diplomacy with both North Korea and in intervening to stop the Saudis from invading Qatar in 2017.
He was also a supporter of the JCPOA, knowing that that deal was as good as it would get until the U.S. stopped all regime change activities around the world. And that was the breaking point.
It was time for the neocons, specifically Sheldon Adelson, the Saudis and the UAE, to push for a new foreign policy. They had to stop Trump from making a deal of substance with North Korea because it would undermine the goal of destroying Iran.
Peace might have broken out in the Middle East and U.S. troops might have come home. The Horror. The Horror.
Remember North Korea and Iran are linked in the minds of the Israelis, Trump and the Neocons because of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
Iran just test-fired a Ballistic Missile capable of reaching Israel.They are also working with North Korea.Not much of an agreement we have!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 23, 2017
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These are the most important 140 characters Donald Trump has written in the past two years. It underscores and puts paid why he is so dead set on pushing the situation with North Korea and Iran to its crisis point.
Readers of this blog know that myself and Halsey English have been saying for months that Iran and North Korea divided up their nuclear weapons ambitions between them. This way they could adhere to the letter of their international agreements while violating the spirit of them.
WHY TRUMP’S TWEET SIGNALS NUCLEAR END-GAME, 9/24/2017
Pompeo and Bolton were installed to rein in Trump and accelerate the antagonism of Iran on behalf of Israel. They were installed to scuttle Korean reunification and make unreasonable demands on every one of Israel’s enemies — Lebanon, Syria and Iran — to ensure non-compliance and justify sanctions.
This is why the JCPOA was the ‘worst deal ever.’ It didn’t preclude the outsourcing of the two halves of the nuclear weapon — the warhead developed by North Korea and the ballistic missile developed by Iran.
This is why Benjamin Netanyahu wants to cripple Iran’s ballistic missile program. And why he is so obsessed with ‘proving’ the Iranians are still making a warhead.
There is no solution to the intractable mess of this situation if the U.S. is dead set on unilateral ultimatums of the kind Bolton and Pompeo only seem capable of.
This is why it is so significant that first Kim Jong-un and now Javad Zarif are trying to cleave Trump away from his advisors handlers and appeal to him directly to de-escalate the situation.
Last week Kim sat down with Russian President Vladimir Putin and affirmed a close relationship while elevating Putin to that of equal partner in any future talks between the U.S. and North Korea.
Putin understands that North Korea would “rather eat dirt” than give up their nukes at this point. They know what happens to countries that negotiate with Americans like John Bolton.
Kim knows like Putin does that “Presidents change, policy doesn’t.” And the U.S. policy on subjugating its adversaries is not open for discussion.
So any agreement between Trump and Kim isn’t likely to last a decade. This is the consequence of Trump’s tearing up every treaty he can get his hands on he doesn’t like.
At some point, like it or not, you honor your agreements or accept that there are no deals possible.
Kim rightly refuses to be treated like an underling and now will only deal with other heads of state. Zarif knows that Trump watches Fox News and so does Fox’s executives who allowed this interview.
The fact that both Kim and Zarif have to go through these channels to get their message across is beyond embarrassing. And not for them.
They both come across here as statesmen while Pompeo continues to look like a buffoon, blundering his way around preparing the world for the Rapture he so clearly thinks is necessary.
Zarif understands that the moves made in the past couple of weeks by Trump through Bolton have the potential for outcomes Trump himself doesn’t want.
Trump wants to win the hand and get his Middle East deal of the century across the finish line. If Bolton has sold him on the notion that the only way to stop Iran and save Israel is to invade and destroy them then the die has been cast and we’d better get out the body counters.
As Scott Ritter points out in the American Conservative the move to nominate the IRGC as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization’ was a de facto declaration of war against Iran which makes thousands of U.S. troops vulnerable in Iraq and Syria where they fight side-by-side against ISIS.
It is well past time for Trump to decide who runs his administration and what his legacy is going to be. Zarif appealed to candidate Trump, a man no longer in existence, who sold his presidency to the neocons to stay in power back in 2017 when he doubled down in Afghanistan.
He’ll never have more political capital to break free of Bolton et.al. than he does now with RussiaGate over and the Democrats in disarray.
Too bad he’s such a coward he can’t see that.
* * *
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