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Enrichment based on technical needs: Iran rolls back on 2015 nuclear deal

RT | January 5, 2020

Tehran has removed the last constraints it agreed to impose on its nuclear program under the 2015 deal but said it is ready to return to fulfilling its obligations under the agreement if the US lifts sanctions.

Iran’s nuclear program “no longer faces any operating restrictions,” a government statement cited by Iranian media said, adding that parameters of enrichment capacity, enrichment level and the amount of enriched material would from now on be determined only by the program’s “technical needs.”

Tehran still vowed to continue its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and said that it could potentially return to fulfilling its obligations under the nuclear deal if sanctions imposed by Washington are lifted and Tehran’s interests are respected.

January 5, 2020 Posted by | Aletho News | , | Leave a comment

Mexico orders ambassador in Bolivia to return after she declared non grata

Press TV – December 30, 2019

Mexico has ordered its ambassador in Bolivia to return to the country in order to ensure her safety.

The Mexican Foreign Ministry said on Monday that the order was issued after Bolivia declared Mexico’s Ambassador Maria Teresa Mercado a “persona non grata.”

Bolivia’s interim leader Jeanine Anez announced Monday that the country has decided to expel Mexico’s ambassador and two Spanish diplomats.

“The constitutional government that I preside over has decided to declare persona non grata the ambassador of Mexico in Bolivia, Maria Teresa Mercado, the charge d’affaires of Spain, Cristina Borreguero, and the (Spanish) consul, Alvaro Fernandez,” Anez said.

The announcement came after Bolivia accused Spanish embassy staff of trying to infiltrate the Mexican mission in the Bolivian capital, La Paz, with a group of masked men to take out former Bolivian president Evo Morales’s aide.

Madrid has strongly denied the accusation.

“The ministry wishes to clarify that the charge d’affaires was purely making a courtesy visit and vehemently denies there was any aim to facilitate the exit of people holed up inside the building,” Spain’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

The Mexican embassy in La Paz has become the center of the diplomatic row after it housed nine officials from Morales’s former government.

On Thursday, Mexico said the Bolivian regime is “harassing” and “intimidating” its diplomatic personnel in La Paz in what seems to be retribution for the granting of asylum by Mexico to Morales.

Mexico City said Bolivia has, among other things, boosted police presence outside the Mexican diplomatic mission in La Paz since Monday, intimidating the diplomats.

Last month, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador gave political asylum to Morales, who had been forced to resign under pressure from the country’s military.

Morales has since relocated to Argentina.

Morales, who had already been president since 2006, won his country’s presidential election in October, but the Bolivian military and opposition claimed that the election had been rigged, inciting deadly street protests.

The 60-year-old president, who enjoys a broad popular base both at home and in Latin America, nevertheless decided to step down and go into exile in Mexico amid threats of violence against him and with an apparent intention not to push the country toward further instability.

December 30, 2019 Posted by | Aletho News | , | Leave a comment

New Year’s swap: Dozens head home as Ukraine & breakaway Donbass conduct ‘all for all’ prisoner exchange

RT | December 29, 2019

Kiev is exchanging dozens of prisoners with the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk republics in the first such effort in two years. The swap was given a boost at the recent Normandy Four talks in Paris.

The self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic has handed over 51 people to Kiev, while receiving 61 of their followers. The Lugansk region returned 25 and took in 63 prisoners; nine people held by Kiev refused to partake in the exchange.

The office of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed that Kiev had received a total of 76 people from Donetsk and Lugansk.

Donetsk’s authorities said their list could be longer, as some people asked to be repatriated shortly before the exchange.

The swap, carried out under an “all for all” formula, was the first since a similar humanitarian effort in December 2017.

The prisoner exchange was overseen by officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). No ceasefire violations were recorded on the frontier.

It also comes weeks after leaders from France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine agreed at a peace summit in Paris to push for a full ceasefire and a new troop disengagement by March 2020.

The summit was the first of its kind in three years, also marking the first time Russian President Vladimir Putin talked reconciliation with his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky.

Before the summit, Kiev and the rebel forces ordered a partial pullback in several areas of the frontline. However, several Ukrainian nationalist organizations stood up against Zelensky’s policies, even deploying their own armed groups to prevent the government from withdrawing their soldiers.

December 29, 2019 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | Leave a comment

More Holocaust Reparations for 2020: the Gift That Keeps on Giving

Yad Vashem – Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu, Donald Trump and Melania, Ivanka and Jared Kushner, Rabbi Yisrael lau. credit: Amos Ben Gershom GPO/ Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs/ Flickr)
By Philip Giraldi • American Herald Tribune • December 29, 2019

Now that 2019 has ended, it is more than seventy-four years since the end of the Second World War. America’s “Greatest Generation” that actually fought the war and endured it on the home front, is dying off and the remembrance of the conflict is increasingly experienced second hand, if at all. The war has been relegated to the history books, one might think, but that would be to ignore one aspect of it which seems to never fade from sight. That would be the so-called holocaust, which has produced a host of taxpayer funded museums, is regularly featured in the media and also is part of mandatory public education in a growing number of states and school districts.

That the established holocaust narrative lives on in spite of its irrelevancy and obvious contradictions is a reflection of Jewish power in the United States. Since the 1970s, when the regular evocations of the holocaust began in earnest, Jews have come to wield considerable influence in American economic, cultural, intellectual and political life. Jews played a central role in American finance during the 1980s, and they were among the chief beneficiaries of that decade’s corporate mergers and reorganizations. Today, though barely two percent of the nation’s population is Jewish, close to half its billionaires are Jews. The chief executive officers of the three major television networks and the four largest film studios are Jews, as are the owners of the nation’s larg­est newspaper chain and the most influential single newspaper, The New York Times. The role and influence of Jews in Ameri­can politics has also developed simultaneously, with Jews heavily over-represented in the Democratic Party and in Congress.

The rise to power on the part of American Jews coincided with the trajectory of Israel in the Middle East. Protecting Israel and Jewish privilege became two sides of the same coin, leading to creation of the holocaust narrative, which Professor Norman Finkelstein has aptly described as The Holocaust Industry. And promotion of the sanctity of the holocaust story has enabled the damnation of skeptics as holocaust-deniers while also increasing the exploitation of the charge of anti-Semitism for those who would dare to criticize either the Jewish tribe itself or Israel.

One of the singular manifestations of the Jewish power in both the U.S. and in Europe has been the creation of mechanisms to address the perceived needs of “holocaust survivors.” One might argue reasonably enough that there cannot be actually that many genuine survivors remaining after 74 years, but the term has proven to be extremely elastic. It has come to include not only the actual victims who were allegedly sent to labor or concentration camps but also any Jew who survived 1939 through 1945 in Europe or even in Asia living in ghettos. And it also includes their children, even if born after the war.

Stuart E. Eizenstat, former Special Representative of the President and Secretary of State on Holocaust-Era Issues. Credit: U.S. National Archives/ Flickr

As a result, the so-called holocaust survivors are now well into their second generation, receiving extra Social Security and Medicare benefits in the United States as well as a steady flow of reparations from Germany and other Europeans, to include France, where forty-nine people who made it out of the Holocaust alive are receiving around $400,000 each, helped by the State Department’s expert on holocaust issues Stuart Eizenstat. The U.S. State Department even has a Holocaust Deportation Claims Program which is always staffed by Jews like Eizenstat.

The reparations programs are generally structured in a way that the payments are limited to Jews, even though there were millions more non-Jews who were victims of the German camps and prisons. Recently there have even been claims that the traumatic holocaust experience might have caused genetic damage, meaning that the need to address the issue by extorting money from the German and other governments will conceivably extend into the foreseeable future.

When in doubt about where to find the money, it is only necessary to get in touch with a professional Zionist Zealot like Eizenstat or with one of the commercial firms that is into the holocaust reparations business. The International Center for Holocaust Reparations is one of them, a corporation registered in Israel with offices located in Jerusalem, Berlin and in Pompano Beach Florida. It was founded by Israeli Zachi Porath and the actual incorporation is in his name as Zachi Porath Ltd.

The organization website headlines that it is “Pursuing Rights of Holocaust Survivors.” It is indeed doing so in a manner of speaking, but it is also a business that makes money by taking a cut of what it obtains. Its website asks what it considers to be key screening questions: “Are you a Holocaust survivor who was interned in a Ghetto?” and “Are you a child of a Holocaust survivor who was interned in a Ghetto?” before getting to the crux of the matter, “You may be entitled to a large sum of money! Even if you are already receiving compensation from the Claims Conference or from the German authorities, including the German Pension Insurance you may be eligible to receive additional payments.”

According to the website “The pension is paid even to those who were interned for a short period of time in a Ghetto (including Ghettos in Poland, Romania, Czernowitz, Shanghai, Sofia, Thessaloniki, Transnistria, Amsterdam, Lithuania, Latvia and Belarus and many more). The possibilities are for a one-time retroactive compensation, as well as a monthly payment from the German Social Security… If you are an heir of a ghetto survivor, and the survivor or their spouse was alive on June 27th 2002, you may be entitled to a one-time payment… We will help you to file the claims for all the money you justly deserve… After you have received the restitution payment, we will charge a fee of 15% of the retroactive sum.”

The website also advises that even second-generation survivors whose parents were interned in a ghetto somewhere for even a short time “may be entitled to a one-time compensation payment… We have been aiding Holocaust survivors all over the world in exercising their rights and have successfully helped many survivors attain their rightful money.”

Some might object to the assertion that Jewish suffering in the war was somehow unique given the fact that far more Russians died than Jews. But the difference is one of perception, due to the effective marketing of a preferred narrative by a powerful and wealthy group that has easy access to the media, to the entertainment industry and to policy makers. And one should not be dismissive of the hard work that has gone into making holocaust reparations eternal. It takes a great deal of ingenuity to devise mechanisms that separate German, French and American taxpayers from their money in perpetuity on behalf of numerous people concentrated apparently in Israel and Florida who may not have suffered at all in the Second World War.

December 29, 2019 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | Leave a comment

Russia says extension of UN arms embargo on Iran out of question

Press TV – December 27, 2019

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov has ruled out the possibility of renewing a UN arms embargo against Iran which is to expire in October 2020 in line with the 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers.

Speaking to the Russian news agency Interfax, Ryabkov said restrictions on Iran’s import and export of arms will expire next year as per the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and it is not possible to renew them.

The US officials’ calls for extension of the embargo are considered as a foreign policy move that has no basis and principle, Ryabkov noted, highlighting that the removal of the embargo is based on the JCPOA, signed by several parties including the US and endorsed by the UN Security Council Resolution 2231.

The Russian official said Moscow is not going to bow to the US demands whenever they want. “They may come up with something else next time.”

Under the nuclear deal, from which the US unilaterally withdrew last year, a UN ban on weapons sales to Tehran will end in October 2020.

Last month, President Hassan Rouhani said Iran intends to stay in the nuclear deal despite the US violations, arguing that the accord will be put to good use next year when a long-running arms embargo against Tehran comes to an end.

“By continuing the JCPOA, we will fulfill a major objective in terms of politics, security and defense,” he said.

Noting that for years Iran has been banned by the United Nations from buying and selling any kinds of weapons, Rouhani said the arms embargo will end next year according to the deal and the UN Security Council Resolution 2231, which endorses it.

“This is one of the important effects of this deal. Otherwise, we could leave the deal today but the kind of benefit we stand to reap next year will no longer exist,” he said.

As the expiration date gets closer, the White House is getting more nervous and American authorities are doing their utmost to make the restrictions permanent.

Last October, US special envoy to Iran Brian Hook told a congressional hearing on US-Iran policy that Washington wanted the UN Security Council to renew the Iranian arms embargo.

One of the issues used by the United States to withdraw from the nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 countries was the time span of the UN arms embargo on Iran. The measure covers all weapons sales and “related material” to Iran.

Earlier in August, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo expressed concern that the resolution restricting weapons sales to Iran is due to end in October 2020.

Iran’s Ambassador to the UN Majid Takht Ravanchi responded to Pompeo’s comments and slammed the United States for causing insecurity and instability with its military presence and “unbridled flow of American weaponry into this region, which has turned it into a powder keg.”

December 27, 2019 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | Leave a comment

Thousands of Russia immigrants to Israel left again after getting passports

MEMO | December 19, 2019

Thousands of immigrants to Israel from the former Soviet Union “may have come only to receive an Israeli passport before moving back abroad”, reported JTA, with the total such cases amounting to up to a quarter of all Russian immigrants.

The article, citing reporting done by Israeli weekly newspaper Makor Rishon, described how “a cottage industry of companies promising expedited Israeli citizenship, and the passport that comes with it” emerged in Russia, “since the passage of a law allowing new immigrants to receive the travel document within the first three months of [moving to Israel]”.

According to the report, “for many in the post-Soviet world, an Israeli passport is considered as desirable as a European Union passport is to Israelis.”

Now, Russian “fixers” are advertising that they can help those able to emigrate to Israel to obtain Israeli citizenship “within two days” for “a cost of thousands of euros”.

JTA added that, according to Makor Rishon,

Under certain circumstances… the three-month period can be shortened to as little as a day, and some immigrants have even been able to receive their passports without having to leave Ben Gurion International Airport.

Based on data from Israel’s Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, it is estimated that approximately 8,500 immigrants from the former Soviet Union “have come just for the passport before immediately leaving the country”.

One official from the Jewish Agency suggested that as many as 25 per cent of the immigrants came for a passport and “left the country immediately after receiving it”.

In 2018, roughly 10,500 Russians and 6,400 Ukrainians emigrated to Israel, “which was the first year that the majority of new immigrants were not considered Jewish under…Jewish religious law”.

December 19, 2019 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | Leave a comment

‘US State Department to cut Iraq-based personnel by third’

Press TV – December 18, 2019

The US State Department reportedly plans to significantly and permanently draw down the number of its personnel in Iraq.

CNN reported Wednesday that it had obtained a memo sent in early December by the State Department to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, outlining the plan to cut the number of its Iraq-based staffers by 28% by the end of May 2020.

The reduction would mean 114 fewer people at the US Embassy in Baghdad, 15 fewer people at the Baghdad Diplomatic Support Center, and eight fewer people at Consulate General in Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan region, the report said.

The cuts would also include Defense Department and US Agency for International Development personnel, the report added.

The diplomatic mission, the memo said, would still be able to achieve its “core objectives” despite the drawdown.

The reported plan comes amid ongoing US attempts to accuse Iran of trying to target its interests in the Arab country.

Back in May, the State Department, in a travel advisory, ordered “non-emergency US government employees” to leave the Baghdad embassy and the consulate in Erbil.

The advisory did not mention Iran, but senior State Department officials said at the time that the cautionary note had been issued because of an “imminent threat” from Iranian “proxies.”

Rejecting the claims back then, Iran’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations said that Washington’s measure was “the latest episode in America’s propaganda war against Iran based on fake intelligence reports.”

Most recently, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo threatened Iran with “decisive” action, accusing it of providing “lethal aid and support to third parties in Iraq and throughout the region.”

The claims come as several rocket attacks have been reported on Iraqi bases hosting US troops as well as foreign missions in Baghdad, which has been, along with other Iraqi cities, the scene of street protests over economic woes since October.

Ali Rabiei, spokesman for the Iranian administration, responded to the threat on Monday, noting that Pompeo had failed to substantiate his allegations with any evidence.

He stated that it was only natural for American facilities to come under attack at a time when Iraq is witnessing protests and when the whole Arab country is facing ambiguity caused by the US interference.

December 18, 2019 Posted by | Aletho News | , | Leave a comment

Saudi Arabia reads the riot act to Imran Khan

By M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | Indian Punchline | December 17, 2019

The Kuala Lumpur Summit 2019 hosted by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur on December 18-21 was originally conceived as a landmark event in the politics of the Muslim world. It still is, albeit on a wet wicket struggling to tackle a nasty googly that Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan threw at the event at the last minute.  

To recap, the idea of the KL Summit was born out of a trilateral pow-vow between Turkish President Recep Erdogan, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed and Pakistan’s Imran Khan in September on the sidelines of the UN GA session in New York.

The common perception of the three countries was that the Muslim World failed to react forcefully enough to the emergent situation affecting the Kashmiri Muslims. Pakistan actively promoted the perception that the leadership of the ummah was not reacting forcefully enough over Muslim issues such as Kashmir.

On November 23, while announcing his decision to host the KL Summit, Mahathir said that the new platform hoped to bring together Islamic leaders, scholars and clerics who would propose solutions to the many problems facing the world’s 1.7 billion Muslims. He disclosed that dignitaries attending the KL Summit would include Erdogan, the Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, and Imran Khan.

The role of politics in development, food security, preserving national identity, and redistributing wealth were listed as other topics to be discussed, alongside the expulsion of Muslims from their homelands and the categorisation of Islam as the “religion of terrorism”.

In poignant remarks, Mahathir bemoaned that no Muslim country was fully developed, and that some Islamic nations were “failed states”. He said,

“Why is there this problem? There must be a reason behind this. We can only know the reason if we get the thinkers, the scholars, and the leaders to give their observations and viewpoints.

“Perhaps we can take that first step … to help Muslims recover their past glories, or at least to help them avoid the kind of humiliation and oppression that we see around the world today.”

Importantly, Mahathir described the summit as a meeting of minds that had the “same perception of Islam and the problems faced by the Muslims”.

From among the list of invitees, it now turns out that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani will be attending tomorrow’s summit, but King Salman of Saudi Arabia has regretted that the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) is being bypassed.

Mahathir disclosed that King Salman  conveyed to him in a phone conversation that it was better that the Muslim issues were discussed in a full-fledged OIC meeting. Mahathir said laconically,

“He (King Salman) wanted to tell me the reasons why he couldn’t make it. He’s afraid that something not good will happen to the Muslims. He has a different opinion from us. He feels that matters like these (Muslim issues) shouldn’t just be discussed by two or three countries, and there should be an OIC meeting and I agreed with him.”

The testy exchange signalled that the Saudi regime sees the KL Summit as a calculated challenge to its leadership of the ummah and as an initiative about laying the foundations for an Islamic alliance.

Mahathir is outspoken but what is less noticed is that his positions actually align closely with those of Turkey and Pakistan. These include the Palestinian question, the situation in Jammu & Kashmir and the persecution of the Rohingya community in Myanmar.

According to the Malaysian news agency Bernama, the KL Summit “aims to revive Islamic civilization, deliberate (over) and find new and workable solutions for problems afflicting the Muslim world, contribute (to) the improvement of the state of affairs among Muslims and Muslim nations, and form a global network between Islamic leaders, intellectuals, scholars, and thinkers.”

In sheer brain power, Saudi Arabia cannot match such an agenda. A sense of frustration has been building up over the past decade or so among the Muslim countries that the OIC is reduced to an appendage of the Saudi foreign policies. Saudi Arabia’s rift with Qatar, its rivalries with Iran, the brutal war in Yemen, the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, etc.  also seriously dented Riyadh’s image in the most recent years.

Of course, Saudis hold a big purse and that still translates as influence but the new Islamic forum is poised to move in a direction that is progressive and far more inspiring, with plans to pursue joint projects, including, eventually, the introduction of a common currency.

Mahathir is on record that this mini-Islamic conference could turn into a much grander initiative down the road. Such optimism cannot be disregarded since a growing number of Muslim-majority countries harbour great unease over the near-term prospect of the ascendancy of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as the Saudi king and the next Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques.

Saudi Arabia, anticipating the gambit being thrown down by Mahathir has reacted viciously to undercut the KL Summit. It tore into the summit’s ‘soft underbelly’ by reading the riot act to Imran Khan,  which put the fear of god into Imran Khan and how it happened we do not know, but the great cricketer panicked and has since called Mahathir to regret that he cannot attend the KL Summit.

No doubt, it is a big insult to Mahathir’s personal prestige but as the old adage says, beggars cannot be choosers and Imran Khan is left with no choice but to obey the Saudi diktat like a vassal.

With Imran Khan staying away, Mahathir is left to host his counterparts from Turkey, Iran, Qatar and Indonesia. The fizz has gone out of the KL Summit. Nonetheless, Mahathir is not the type of person to forget and forgive. His initial reaction to Imran Khan’s cowardly behaviour shows studied indifference, betraying his sense of hurt.

Pakistan is ultimately the loser here, as its credibility has been seriously dented. Imran Khan was the original promoter of the idea of the three-way axis of Turkey-Pakistan-Malaysia. But to be fair, his modest agenda was to create an exclusive India-baiting regional forum that he can use at will, whereas Mahathir turned it into an unprecedented Islamic forum that is independent of Saudi influence. Perhaps, Mahathir can only blame himself for the overreach.

December 17, 2019 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Russia, China Submit UN Resolution to Lift Sanctions on North Korea

Sputnik – December 16, 2019

Russia and China have submitted a draft resolution to the UN Security Council to lift sanctions on North Korea and promptly resume the ‘six-party’ talks, according to the text of the document.

The resolution proposes to exempt the inter-Korean rail and road cooperation from UN sanctions and lift all measures previously imposed by the UN Security Council directly related to civilian livelihood, among others.

The draft resolution also “calls for prompt resumption of the six-party talks or re-launch of multilateral consultations in any other similar format, with the goal of facilitating a peaceful and comprehensive solution through dialogue, reducing tensions on the Korean Peninsula and beyond, and promoting peaceful co-existence and mutually beneficial regional cooperation in North-East Asia”.

North Korea has been subject to numerous UN sanctions since 2006 for its nuclear and ballistic missile tests.

After a US-North Korea summit in Vietnam in February, Pyongyang committed itself to end nuclear tests and launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles. This non-binding pledge did not, however, extend to engine tests, or the launches of satellites or medium- and short-range ballistic missiles.

In October, Pyongyang gave the US until the end of the year to come up with a mutually-acceptable deal to advance the denuclearization process. North Korea’s vice foreign minister, Ri Thae Song, said that the dialogue on denuclearization promoted by Washington was a “foolish trick” used in favor of the political situation in the US and warned of a “Christmas gift”.

Earlier this month, Pyongyang conducted what it had described as “crucial” tests at the Sohae Satellite Launching Ground. The tests reportedly threaten to undermine Washington’s drive to denuclearize the Korean peninsula through the use of diplomacy.

US President Donald Trump told reporters earlier that his administration is closely watching North Korea amid reports that Pyongyang is resuming missile tests and would be disappointed if something was “in the works”.

Since 2018, the United States and North Korea have held two summits, agreeing in principle to normalize relations while pursuing a policy of denuclearization.

Negotiations came to a halt, with Washington demanding more decisive steps from Pyongyang. North Korea has blamed the United States for not properly following through on its previous gestures of goodwill.

December 16, 2019 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | Leave a comment

Turkish ships chase Israeli vessel out of Cypriot waters

Press TV – December 15, 2019

Turkish navy ships have intercepted an Israeli research vessel in Cypriot waters, over which Ankara claims jurisdiction, forcing it to leave the area in a move that could negatively impact an ambitious Israeli project to pipe natural gas to Europe.

Quoting unnamed senior Israeli officials, Israel’s channel 13 news reported Saturday that the rare incident occurred two weeks ago when Turkish vessels approached Bat Galim.

Turkish navy officers radioed the Israeli ship and demanded to know its business in the area, and then ordered it to leave. The Israeli vessel had no choice but to comply and depart, said the report.

According to the report, the Israeli ship was conducting research in coordination with Cypriot officials and the Cypriot government.

Over the past year, Turkey has sent military ships as well as drilling ships to search for crude oil in the waters.

Recently, tensions have risen between Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus regarding gas fields discovered in the eastern Mediterranean.

In an interview with Reuters in September, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan accused Greek Cypriots of trying to deprive Northern Cyprus of its rights.

EU member Cyprus and Turkey have argued for years regarding the ownership of fossil fuels in the eastern Mediterranean, where Ankara says Turkish Cypriots are entitled to a share of the resources.

Tensions rose again last month when Turkey signed agreements with Libya on maritime boundaries and military cooperation in the Mediterranean.

Erdogan said the maritime deal with Libya — which maps out a boundary between the two countries in the energy-rich eastern Mediterranean close to the Greek island of Crete — was in line with international law.

Israel’s Channel 13 said tensions could negatively affect an Israeli project to pipe natural gas to Europe. The pipeline is set to pass through Cyprus and Greece’s territorial waters.

According to the report, an Israeli embassy official in Ankara was summoned last week to be warned that the pipeline would require Turkey’s approval since it has to pass through Turkey’s economic waters.

“The Turks are trying to establish themselves as the ones running the show, and that is very worrying,” an Israeli official told Channel 13.

The media in Tel Aviv have reported that the UAE has invested as much as $100 million in an ambitious Israeli project to pipe natural gas to Europe.

Turkey, which does not have diplomatic ties with the Greek Cyprus, has vowed to prevent what it sees as a unilateral move by Greek Cypriots to claim offshore resources. It says some areas of Cyprus’s offshore maritime zone fall under what Ankara calls the territory of the Turkish Cyprus.

The island has been divided into Turkish Cypriot-controlled northern and Greek Cypriot-controlled southern territories since a brief war in 1974, which saw Turkey intervene militarily in response to a Greek-backed military coup on the island to annex Cyprus to Greece.

Greek Cypriots run the island’s government in the south, while Turkish Cypriots have a breakaway state in the north and say offshore resources belong to them, too.

Israel has signed a multilateral deal for the Eastern Mediterranean Pipeline Project with Greece, Italy and Cyprus. The European Union also supports the project.

Israel is already locked in a bitter dispute with Lebanon over tapping Mediterranean energy resources.

Last February, Israel described as “very provocative” a Lebanese tender for projects in two of the Arab country’s 10 offshore blocks in the Mediterranean Sea.

Israel itself has long been developing a number of disputed offshore gas deposits in the Mediterranean Sea, with the Tamar gas field with proven reserves of 200 billion cubic meters already producing gas, while the larger Leviathan field is expected to go online in the coming months.

December 15, 2019 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Will Pelosi have the Votes to Impeach?

By Renée Parsons | OffGuardian | December 13, 2019

Despite an inadequate performance last week by Constitutional law experts before the House Judiciary Committee, Chair Jerrold Nadler released a unilateral committee report on Saturday entitled “Constitutional Grounds for Presidential Impeachment.” The Report came the day after Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s press conference in which she directed the formation of Articles of Impeachment.

As has become apparent to any objective observer; that is one who prefers facts over fiction, the Democrats remain locked in an imaginary world struggling to maintain relevance, a stature of standing that no longer exists.

Presumably with no Quid Pro Quo, no allegation of criminal conduct, no legally substantial evidence or factual basis and no bipartisan support, in defiance of previous impeachment norms, the Democrats are hell bent on making public jackasses out of themselves.

In a hearing with Constitutional legal experts expected to score big legal points in support of impeachment, the witnesses instead turned out to be smug, hyper partisan activists as they were consistently unpersuasive and unimpressive.

All three displayed not a wit of objectivity or neutrality while touting their own personal political agenda with a foreign policy ax to grind, leaving the unmistakable impression that their testimonies were nothing short of conflated.

Condescending as if pontificating to a class of mediocre law students, Professor Noah Feldman had suggested in 2017 that Presidential tweets could be grounds for impeachment, indicative of the depth of his thinking as he repeatedly impressed himself with his own rhetoric.

Professor Pamela Karlan opened with a shrillness that grew into a hyperbole spewing divisiveness among the American people and went on to revisit the Russiagate and foreign electoral influence myth ad nauseam. Those dim witted Democrats on the committee repeated the mantra as if held in a spellbound trance whenever “Russiagate” was mentioned. There was no mention of Israel interference in US elections.  Testimony of Professor Michael Gerhardt.

Stating that he had not voted for Trump in 2016, GWU Law Professor Jonathan Turley who is a registered Democrat (as is yours truly) opened with a brilliant statement as he set the tone for an extraordinarily compelling testimony throughout the day, carefully explaining to the Democrats why they had not met a credible legal threshold for impeachment.

Factually concise with rational, impartial explanations, Turley effectively disputed Democratic claims that an abuse of power stemming from a presumed effort to help one’s own re-election is “inferred” and does not constitute proof of intent or direct knowledge of what was in the President’s mind.

However, it did not appear that any of the Democrats had the acute sensibility to understand Turley’s point as there is an edge of lunacy to the collective Democratic mind these days.

What the Democrats fail to grasp is the double-standard that every politician makes decisions based on what is best for their reelection just as the Dems are hoping to benefit electorally in 2020 with the farcical impeachment.

After his testimony, Mr. Turley tweeted. “Before I finished my testimony, my home and office were inundated with (death) threatening messages and demands that I be fired from GW.”

While it was surprising that there was no Democratic Star on either the Intel or Judiciary Committees who stepped forward to make a credible, cogent case for impeachment,  it was somewhat surprising that the Republicans had an energetic array of participating Members not limited to Intel ranking member Devin Nunes (Calif), Judiciary ranking minority Rep. Doug Collins (NC), Rep. Jim Jordan (Oh), Rep. John Ratcliffe (Texas) and Rep. Mark Gaetz (R-Fla) all of whom can be expected to continue their Bulldog approach as the Committee begins preparing Articles of Impeachment.

For instance, Rep. Martha Roby (R-Ala) asked the defining question regarding the purpose of the hearing with “no fact witnesses” via a process that has been “insufficient, unprecedented and grossly inadequate.” Roby pointed out that the Dems had apparently not considered: that a constitutional law panel should come “only after specific charges have been made known and underlying facts presented in full due to an exhaustive investigation. How does anyone expect a panel of law professors to weigh in on legal grounds for impeachment prior to knowing what the grounds brought by this Committee are going to be?

At her news conference the day after the Judiciary committee hearing, Pelosi was asked by a reporter “Do you hate President Trump?” Pelosi responded with a shaky false piety as if she knows the votes are not there:

We don’t hate anybody. Not anybody in the World. And as a Catholic, I resent your using the word ‘hate’ in a sentence that addresses me. I don’t hate anyone. I was raised in a way that is full – a heart full of love and always pray for the president, And I still pray for the president. I pray for the president all the time, So don’t mess with me when it comes to words like that.

It is a curiosity that with the 2020 election a scant twelve months away, the Democrats have not made the case for the urgency of why impeachment needs to occur right now, immediately, before the Christmas holidays when the Spirit of Good Cheer, Universal Love and Peace for all Americans should take precedence over the Democrat’s divisive animosity, pitting one American against another.

In 2018, thirty-one new Democrats were elected to the House; predominately from districts that voted for Trump in 2016 assuring a tough 2020 re-election campaign.

Let’s assume that every one of those 31 newbies have been paying very close attention to the Intel and Judiciary committee hearings with two questions in mind:

Is there sufficient legal evidence to convince my constituents to support Articles of Impeachment and is this flawed impeachment campaign worth losing my seat in Congress?

Did any of those 31 notice when the Constitutional law experts were asked by Rep. Matt Gaetz “Can you identify one single material fact in the Schiff Report? – all four remained silent.

House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-0SC) has already indicated that he does not intend to ‘whip’ the Dems in preparation for an Impeachment vote on the House floor and that the Dems “expect to lose some votes.”

Let’s do the math: With 233 Dems and 197 Republicans, if 18 of the 31 House newbies do not vote to impeach, the Democratic Motion to approve Articles of Impeachment will fail with a tie of 215 votes. Whether the Dems lose 18 votes or less, the damage will be irreversible.

As the Democratic party appears to have lost whatever is left of its sanity and integrity, the question remains why are the Democrats willing to sacrifice losing some of those 31 House seats in 2020?

December 13, 2019 Posted by | Aletho News | | Leave a comment

UN ‘unable’ to verify claims Iran was behind Saudi Aramco attacks

Press TV – December 11, 2019

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres says the world body’s investigators are “unable to independently corroborate” the US and Saudi claims that Iran was behind attacks on the kingdom’s Aramco oil facilities in September.

Guterres announced in a report on Tuesday that all the debris from the weapons used against Saudi Arabia’s state oil company Aramco had been examined and the UN could not yet verify anti-Iran claims made by Washington and Riyadh.

“At this time, it is unable to independently corroborate that the cruise missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles used in these attacks are of Iranian origin,” Guterres wrote in his semi-annual Iran report to the Security Council.

The UN chief added that the world body is “still collecting and analyzing additional information on these cruise missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles” and would report additional findings in “due course.”

The attacks, which hit Aramco’s oil facilities in Khurais and Abqaiq in east of Saudi Arabia on September 14, were claimed by Yemen’s Houthi Ansartullah movement but the kingdom and the US were adamant to blame it on Iran without evidence.

Iran has rejected the allegations of any involvement and said the attack was a legitimate act of self-defense by Yemen, which has been under incessant strikes by the Saudi-led coalition since 2015.

The attacks cut nearly half of Saudi Arabia’s total oil production and sent shockwaves across the global markets.

Saudi Arabia has constantly denied the attacks would have any impact on the kingdom’s finances, with the government estimating that GDP growth would stand at around 1.9% at the end of 2019.

December 11, 2019 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | Leave a comment

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