Canada Sanctions 14 People in Venezuela After ‘Illegitimate’ Elections
Sputnik – 30.05.2018
Canada has imposed new sanctions against key figures in the government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Global Affairs Canada said in a press release on Wednesday.
“In response to the illegitimate and anti-democratic presidential elections held in Venezuela on May 20, Canada today announces further sanctions on key figures in the Maduro regime,” the release said.
The sanctions target 14 individuals responsible “for the deterioration of democracy in Venezuela,” the foreign ministry added.
Canada is not the first country to introduce restrictions against Venezuela following the re-election of Nicolas Maduro. Previously, Washington, citing “fraudulent vote,” banned US citizens from all transactions tied to Venezuelan government debt. The order he signed also prevented Venezuelan officials from selling equity in any entity majority-owned by the government. The EU, in its turn, froze some assets belonging to a number of Venezuelan individuals, companies and organizations
On May 20, Venezuela held its presidential election, with four candidates in the running. According to the National Electoral Council (NEC), incumbent leader Nicolas Maduro was re-elected as Venezuelan president for his second term, having secured 68 percent of votes, with slightly over 46 percent voter turnout. A number of states, including the EU members, have slammed the vote as either unfair or illegitimate.
Italy’s anti-euro bloc likely to gain crushing majority in new elections
Asia Times | May 30, 2018
After investors hailed for a brief moment Italian President Sergio Matterella’s stand against a fledging populist coalition, a sense of dread began to set in. Matterella’s move to foil the League party and Five Star Movement’s bid to form a government forestalled the installation of an anti-euro finance minister, but may ultimately make the newly-formed, anti-euro alliance an even more powerful force.
What comes next could be a nightmare scenario for those hoping to blunt the determination of Italy’s populists to enact policies which many fear will prove disastrous for Italy’s debt solvency. The prospect of tax cuts along with a massive increase in entitlements has already triggered a selloff in Italian bonds. If new elections are held, despite the market turmoil the populists have caused, some analysts say they will only be emboldened.
An election simulation conducted by the Bologna-based Cattaneo Institute, as reported by Italy’s Ansa news agency, found that the League-Five Star coalition would sweep elections across most of the country, winning more than 90% of uninominal parliamentary elections. Just over one-third of the seats in both the Senate and the Chamber are awarded based on a direct first-past-the-post basis (uninominal), with voters electing specific candidates.
More than 90% of that uninominal vote will give the League-Five Star juggernaut around 35% of the seats in parliament just to start with. The remaining seats, which are awarded on a proportional basis between parties, would give them a two-thirds majority, according to Cattaneo’s projection. That represents a 15% bonus over what they achieved in the March elections.
The upshot: All the populists have to do is sit back and let the establishment attack them until the election, and clean up.
Italian president appoints ex-IMF official Cottarelli as interim PM, gives him mandate to form govt.
Press TV – May 28, 2018
Italian President Sergio Mattarella has appointed Carlo Cottarelli, a former senior director at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as interim prime minister, giving him mandate to form a government ahead of snap elections in the country, which has been without a government for two months.
Cottarelli made the announcement after a meeting with Mattarella on Monday, saying he would put together a transitional government “very quickly” and lead the country to fresh elections slated in the fall or early next year.
“I have accepted the task to form a government as the president has asked. As an Italian I am very honored by this task and I will do my best,” Cottarelli said.
The former senior IMF official also told reporters that he would soon return to parliament with a budget program to be put to the vote for approval.
“I will present myself to parliament with a program, which, if it wins the backing of parliament, would include the passage of the 2019 budget, and then parliament would be dissolved with elections at the beginning of 2019,” he said.
“In the absence of a confidence (vote), the government would resign immediately and its main function would be the management of ordinary affairs until elections are held after August 2018,” Cottarelli added.
The appointment came after anti-establishment forces abandoned efforts to form a ruling coalition in the European country and hit a standoff with the president over his refusal to endorse a eurosceptic pick for the post of finance minister.
Mattarella vetoed the nomination of Paolo Savona as economy minister in a coalition of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and far-right League party.
The 76-year-old president said he would accept every proposed minister except Savona, who had formerly asserted that Italy’s entry into the European Union’s single currency, euro, was a “historic mistake.”
Mattarella stressed that he had done “everything possible” to aid the formation of a government but an openly eurosceptic economy minister ran against the parties’ joint promise to simply “change Europe for the better from an Italian point of view.”
The two populist parties accused Mattarella of betraying voters and later dropped their plan to take power.
Mattarella’s action sparked angry calls for his impeachment and the chaos sent Italian stocks tumbling by as much as two percent at one stage.
Cottarelli, 64, is widely known at home as “Mr. Scissors” for making cuts to public spending. To become prime minister, he is required to gain the approval of parliament with Five Star and the League holding a majority in both houses.
Italy — a founding member of the European Union — has been without a government since an election in early March when Five Star and League emerged as the biggest parties.
The two parties have vowed to battle the EU over its financial and immigration policies. The two have formerly been open to the possibility of Italy holding a referendum on euro.
The prospect of a eurosceptic government in Rome has concerned EU leaders such as French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who are pushing for further political and economic integration.
Austria’s New Coalition Betrays on CETA Trade Agreement
By F. William Engdahl – New Eastern Outlook – 28.05.2018
US President Trump told the world his government rejects negotiations on the highly controversial TTIP (Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership). Citizen groups and EU opponents of the Obama comprehensive trade agreement breathed a sigh of relief. Too little attention has been given to the agreement reached between Canada and CETA, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (German: Umfassendes Wirtschafts- und Handelsabkommen), sometimes called the Canada-EU Trade Agreement. Secretly and behind any public open discussion, the largest global multinational corporations are moving the world closer to a top-down corporate dictatorship, a 21st Century version of Mussolini’s Corporativism. A major potential roadblock to CETA approval has now fallen in Austria under a new populist coalition government of Sebastian Kurz.
Legally the CETA must be approved by the national parliaments in a majority of the 28 EU member states before becoming operative. Now it comes out that Sebastian Kurz’s populist Austrian coalition, after campaigning on a platform of NO to CETA and TTIP, secretly agreed late in 2017 to renege on their election campaign promises opposing CETA as a precondition for the refugee-critical conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) of Sebastian Kurz as Chancellor, to be able to form a coalition government with the right populist FPÖ. It represents a major betrayal of Austrian voters as well as of the future of EU sovereign national laws on environment, health and safety. But it gets worse.
In terms of the legitimacy of the Austrian elections in October 2017, the coalition FPÖ party campaigned hard against any acceptance of the multinational CETA trade deal. It promised a Swiss-style “direct democracy” referendum process of citizen vote on issues where a substantial number of citizen petitions warranted such. In their election campaign the FPÖ promised repeatedly such slogans as ”with us no CETA” and “… CETA only with a peoples’ referendum.”
Pre-election polls showed that 72% of Austrians opposed both the TTIP and the closely-related CETA on grounds it would damage Austrian small and mid-size businesses to the advantage of global multinationals. Citizen groups gathered an impressive 562,000 signatures opposing both CETA and TTIP before the election.
Only days following the election, on November 21, 2017, the FPÖ showed signs of retracting that opposition when they surprised voters and voted in Parliament in favor of the CETA’s most controversial proviso, the so-called the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism (German: Investitionsschiedsgerichten). That ISDS proviso allows Canadian corporations sue any EU government over any new law or policy that might reduce their profits in future such as a new German minimum wage law or stricter laws prohibiting toxic chemicals such as glyphosate or neonicotinoids. However, the Canadian company or investor in say, Germany, does not sue in a German court. They rather go to a special secret arbitration tribunal over which the EU state has no control. Opposition to the ISDS was a central platform of the Austrian FPÖ campaign before October 15. Most USA large corporations have subsidiary companies in Canada meaning CETA is a backdoor for the now-frozen TTIP with the USA.
Forcing EU states to dilute laws
Among its provisions, under CETA as under TTIP if there is a difference in rigor for example in the environmental or safety and health standards for EU states and the Canadian rules, the lowest standard (North American) applies. The Canadian government has largely followed US loose corporate regulations in recent years and this under CETA now would threaten a diminishing of EU strict regulations. According to an Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
and Greenpeace-Holland study, “Canada has weaker food safety and labelling standards than the EU, and industrial agriculture more heavily dependent on pesticides and GMO crops. CETA gives Canadian and US multinationals the tools to undermine rules concerning cloning, GMO crops, growth hormones and country of origin labelling, among others.”
According to the September, 2017 joint study, CETA will “promote the harmonization of food safety standards to the lowest common denominator, and the weakening of the EU’s risk assessment standards for food products.” A horrifying example is the decision in March 2016, by the Canadian authorities to approve AquAdvantage Salmon, the first genetically modified animal to be approved for human consumption in the country. Canada did not require labelling. Under CETA now, unlabeled GMO salmon will be sold across the EU. That holds for other unlabeled Canadian GMO foods as well as industrial agribusiness products such as beef.
Giant Agribusiness Threatens EU Family Farm
With CETA, for example, current EU laws requiring Country of Origin Labeling for meat and fish could be challenged by Canadian agribusiness whose meat exports will now come almost tariff-free to compete with carefully-controlled EU meat products.
Another proviso of CETA relates to reducing business costs and limiting regulation. In reality it will mean stronger EU food and agricultural policies will be weakened under pressure from large Canadian-US agribusiness companies such as IBP or Cargill Foods. To date the EU agriculture associations have largely contained the economic cost-reduction pressure that has destroyed family farming smaller units in North America since the 1980’s and replaced it with cartel formations of giant food industry.
Driven by US agribusiness lobbying at the USDA and Canadian Department of Agriculture, economies of scale in meat processing as an example have created documented horrendous sanitary conditions in giant processing operations that slaughter up to 1,000,000 cattle a year at a plant. Now with CETA, EU small farmers will simply be driven into bankruptcy as was done since the 1980s in North America. There the giant meat processing firms had 25-30% lower costs than smaller meat packing firms that were driven out of business.
The creation of North American agribusiness, a major focus of the TTIP as of the CETA, involves the dramatic reduction of labor costs and speedup of the meat processing portions that are not automated. Work is not protected by trade union agreements, labor is mostly immigrant and largely illegal meaning they are vulnerable to threat from employers demanding longer hours and lessened safety conditions.
North American slaughterhouse workers face conditions of speedup on the meat chains that they must cut and process that they have abnormally high rate of work-related injuries or nerve damage but the Government regulators turn a blind eye and the workers are mostly sub-minimum wage illegal workers from Mexico or Central America who have little recourse to change it.
As I account in my book, Seeds of Destruction, the cartelization and vertical integration of agriculture in North America after World War II was a brainchild of the Rockefeller Standard Oil family, notably Nelson Rockefeller and a project they financed at Harvard Business School that created the term “agribusiness.” The countries of the European Union until today have largely defended more small-scale meat and food production by way of safety, health, environment and labor laws. With the flood of far cheaper Canadian (North American in reality) beef and other foods into the EU under CETA, European small scale, high quality agriculture producers will be literally slaughtered to the gain of mass agribusiness cartels that can now globalize in the all-important EU market as well.
Austria is a Warning Bell
Now on May 16 the Austrian coalition parties, FPÖ and the ÖVP of Sebastian Kurz, turned on the voters and voted in the Council of Ministers in favor of approving CETA including with the controversial investor-state dispute settlement mechanism. It will now come to the full Parliament before Summer for a final vote where passage looks certain.
The European Commission proposed the signature of the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) and despite need for national parliaments to ratify, CETA entered into force provisionally on 21 September 2017. National parliaments in EU countries have still to approve it before it can take full effect.
With an Austrian coalition government, one that owes its existence to vigorous opposition to CETA and defense of the right of citizens to hold a referendum on it and other issues, now betraying that voter pledge and backing CETA, implications for not just Austrian citizens—farmers and all consumers—but as well for the quality of world food exports, the health of world eaters (meaning us all) is to undergo a dramatic decline at a time we can ill afford it.
Under CETA now the world food chain will face over the coming decade or so an overwhelming concentration of corporate agribusiness control that will combine the two great agriculture production regions—North America and the EU. That, if it is allowed, will be devastating.
EU Extends Sanctions Against Syria for One Year
Sputnik – 28.05.2018
The European Union has decided to extend sanctions against Syria by one year, until June 1, 2019, the EU Council said in a statement on Monday.
“On 28 May 2018, the Council extended EU restrictive measures against the Syrian regime until 1 June 2019. Given the ongoing repression of the civilian population, the EU decided to maintain its restrictive measures against the Syrian regime and its supporters, in line with the EU strategy on Syria,” the document read.
The European Union introduced sanctions “against Syria and persons responsible for the violent repression against the civilian population” in May 2011, during the Arab Spring protests, which led to the ongoing civil war in the country.
In 2017 EU also imposed restrictions on Syrian officials who relate to the development an the use of chemical weapons in the country, with over 250 individuals targeted by the sanctions for the involvement in the development and use of chemical weapons against the civilian population. Damascus strongly denied those accusations, also noting that the international organizations didn’t find any evidence of the chemical weapons development by the Syrian government.
In its turn, the US ruled out any American reconstruction support to Assad-controlled territories in the war-weary country.
‘Unprecedented institutional clash’: Italy fails to form govt over anti-EU economic minister
RT | May 27, 2018
Italy’s PM-designate Giuseppe Conte said he’s given up on attempts to form a government after President Sergio Mattarella rejected his candidacy for economy minister. The country may now face a new election by the end of 2018.
“President [Mattarella] has received Prof. Giuseppe Conte …. who returned the mandate given to him on May 23 to form the government. The president has thanked him for his effort in fulfilling this task,” Ugo Zampetti, an official within the presidential administration, told RAI. After the talk, Mattarella said that he was going to make a decision on the new parliamentary vote in the country in the coming hours.
The president had summoned Conte to his office in order to find a way to break the two-months-long deadlock on forming the coalition government after a similar meeting on Friday ended fruitlessly.
The candidacy for economy minister has been the main stumbling block for the creation of the new cabinet in the country. The anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) and its rightist coalition ally Lega Nord, which won the most parliamentary seats in the March vote, insist on having Paolo Savona in the vital role.
M5S was outraged by Mattarella’s decision, with 5-star leader Luigi Di Maio calling it “an institutional clash without precedent” in a Facebook live video.
“What’s the point of going to vote if it’s the ratings agencies that decide?” Di Maio fumed.
Paolo Savona is a distinguished economist who served as the industry minister in 1993-94 and also worked at the Bank of Italy. But Mattarella has been refusing to appoint the 81-year-old due to concerns over his criticism of euro, the EU and Germany’s economic policies. In a book, which Savona co-authored in 2015, he argued that Italy should have a “plan B” to leave the eurozone with minimum damage if the situation calls for it.
Earlier on Sunday, Savona made a public statement to clarify his views, saying that he stands for “a different Europe, stronger, but more equal.” He said that he believes Italy’s debt should be reduced through targeted investment and stimulation of the economy, but not austerity or tax cuts.
Barbarians at the gate? End of democracy? Most hysterical establishment takes on new Italian govt
By Igor Ogorodnev | RT | May 23, 2018
Mainstream political analysts have unleashed their doom-laden predictions about the impact of Italy’s Five Star-Lega coalition, though their hostility is tempered by new-found concern for the “desperate,” misguided electorate.
‘The Weimar Republic’
“It may be too late. The spiral of populism is: unhappy voters; irresponsible promises, bad outcomes; even unhappier voters; still more irresponsible promises; and worse outcomes. The story is not over. It may have just begun,” writes Martin Wolf in the Financial Times.
The FT has been one of the most apprehensive publications since Silvio Berlusconi stepped aside to allow the two upstart parties to form a coalition. An article last week went under the headline “Rome opens gates to modern barbarians” – presumably the majority of the Italian electorate, who voted for the two biggest parties in March – while another FT column on Monday said that the election paved the way “to liberal democracy’s demise,” and invoked the mistakes of the Weimar Republic before the ascent of Adolf Hitler.
For many centrist observers, the two parties are a devilish blend of retrograde baseness and cynical online savvy, a prototype of political activity that won’t just be in charge of Italy until the next election (feasibly just months away), but will somehow poison the well of modern politics.
“These parties are incoherent, angry, unrealistic and often anti-science; they are also clever users of information technology. The Northern League and the Five Star Movement represent every powerful emotion, resentment, suspicion and anxiety that can be mobilized and weaponized by modern political parties. Above all, they reflect the disillusionment with politics — the disillusionment with everything — that inevitably sets in when populism fails,” writes Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post, who connects their rise with supposedly Trump-like failures of Berlusconi’s previous terms.
Applebaum is merely continuing the view expressed by New York Times pundit David Brooks, who suggested back around the time of the election that the decline of established centrist parties will lead to “political groups that are crazier than anything you could have imagined before.”
“Once the norms of acceptable behavior are violated and once the institutions of government are weakened, it is very hard to re-establish them. Instead, you get this cycle of ever more extreme behavior, as politicians compete to be the most radical outsider,” wrote Brooks, notably without asking once why the first-world Italian society would want to be governed en-masse by these supposed lunatics. It would also be curious to detangle the assemblage of loaded terms – what is “acceptable” or “extreme” or “weakened” in Brooks’ understanding?
‘Can’t be trusted to run the country’
As witnessed previously following Brexit and Donald Trump’s election, Italy’s government seems to have turned political analysts, often of a nominally center-left persuasion, into avid market watchers, nay, defenders, with particular concern over the fate of the eurozone (Paul Mason in the New Statesman described the prospect of an EU-Rome stand-off as “bloodcurdling”).
“Brussels is allowed to be concerned, because the populists set to take over the EU’s third-largest economy could rattle the euro zone with irresponsible financial policies,” an opinion piece in Deutsche Welle said. “To bail out an economy as large as Italy’s in a way that is similar to what happened in Greece would be practically impossible.”
“Another reason to beware is the parties’ programmes,” proclaims the Economist, which two sentences earlier said the parties “can’t be trusted” to run Italy. “Their visceral Euroscepticism threatens the integrity of the euro zone. The Five-Star Movement has only recently stepped back from pledging to hold a referendum on leaving the single currency.”
Indeed, why would anyone question, not to mention ask the public, whether the euro has been a success? While a new economic crisis in Europe would have seismic consequences for Italy first of all, this sort of analysis entirely misses the point of the coalition’s manifesto (they were not elected to save the euro!) and turns them, a symptom of the continent’s troubles, into its cause.
The Economist, and other publications, whose offices are located in other countries, have also enjoyed the luxury of lecturing Italy, which has borne the brunt of recent illegal immigration (over 600,000 are still in the country) into Europe on its election of anti-migrant parties.
“The League goes well beyond reasonable concern over refugees, advocating xenophobic and unworkable deportation policies,” on one of the issues where perspective seems to make all the difference – migration was the biggest worry for Italians polled before the vote, and the inability to control it was likely the primary reason for the decimation of the ruling center-left.
Will there be a better time to deploy Game of Thrones parallel?
Of course, other than accusations of fascism, made somewhat difficult by the thoroughly un-Mussolini-like two months of patient coalition-building – it’s hardly been the March on Rome – the other powerful and trump card remains Russia.
“This single-minded dedication to improving ties with Moscow as a panacea for all that ails the world is in line with the close links both parties are known to have cultivated with the Kremlin,” Haaretz insinuates of the new government’s desire to drop sanctions against Moscow.
And undoubtedly, what the Economist calls “excessive Russophilia” is liable to cause deleterious and sinister effects – there is only one step from liking Putin, to actually becoming Putin.
“Populists like Salvini understand that – as Petyr Baelish puts it in Game of Thrones – ‘chaos is a ladder,'” writes Mason in his New Statesman piece. “Salvini is a fan of Putin and Le Pen, and knows that the route to power for authoritarian right-wing nationalists is through the drama of increasingly chaotic situations.”
So to summarize: Italy is on course to destroy the euro, bankrupt itself, but bounce back by turning into a dictatorship, ushering in a new age of authoritarianism across Europe. Not even Italy’s new leaders themselves could conjure up such power fantasies, as they doze off during the fifth hour of a Brussels finance ministers’ meeting.
READ MORE:
Ditching Russia sanctions is part of draft coalition deal with Lega Nord – M5S to RT
Pompeo Claims Iran Conducts Assassinations in Europe, Bewilders Experts
Sputnik – 23.05.2018
Speaking on May 21 at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, Pompeo said some pretty strange things in his speech, “A New Iran Strategy.”
“Today, the Iranian Quds Force conducts covert assassination operations in the heart of Europe,” he said nonchalantly, between calling out Iran’s Taliban support in Afghanistan, support for Yemen’s Houthis and the holding of US citizens hostage.
He never elaborated on that passage.
These are some strange accusations, considering that for the last two decades, there have been no assassinations in Europe linked to Tehran in any way. As the Guardian points out, the last people whose violent death was in any way connected to Iran were Shapour Bakhtiar, the former Persian prime minister under the Shah, who was assassinated in France in 1991, and four Iranian Kurdish dissidents who were shot in Berlin the next year.
There was also a bombing of a bus with Israeli tourists in Bulgaria in 2012, but it was Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia, that was blamed for the incident. The former president of Argentina, Cristina Kirchner, was ordered late last year to stand trial for allegedly helping cover up Iran’s alleged role in the 1994 Jewish center bombing that killed 85 people in the country. That connection has never been proven.
What were you talking about, Mr. Pompeo?
As per the Guardian, other journalists were also pretty puzzled by the statements and turned to Heather Nauert, the department’s spokesperson, for comments. That didn’t help.
“He has information and access to information that I do not,” she said during a press briefing on May 22. “I am not able to comment on that in particular but I can tell the secretary has assured me that there is a basis for that point in his speech and he stands firmly behind that.”
US diplomats specializing in Iran were equally surprised by Pompeo’s allegations.
The claim was also questioned by Iraj Mesdaghi, a Sweden-based Iranian political activist who was jailed in Iran for a decade between 1981 and 1991.
“There is no evidence to back the claim that currently they are carrying out such operations in Europe,” he said pointing out that the shooting of Kurdish dissidents in Berlin was never blamed on Quds Force or the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) in general.
There was one case worth pointing out, though: last year, Ahmad Mola Nissi, an Iranian dissident, was killed in the Hague. He was a leader of an Iranian separatist group, whose armed wing was responsible for several attacks in Iran.
But, according to the Guardian, the Dutch investigation has not publicly blamed the IRGC. If that is what Pompeo was talking about, then he just disclosed previously classified information.
“There is no public evidence to weigh these claims and European officials have been silent,” says Shashank Joshi, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London.
According to Mesdaghi, Tehran gave up on the idea of assassinating people after a 1997 court case on the Berlin shooting made it clear the EU would not tolerate the practice.
“It would be very unusual for Iran to have carried out his killing, given the relationship they have with Europe now and the fact that Nissi was not influential, nor important enough,” he said.
Maduro re-elected Venezuelan president; rival candidate challenges results
Press TV – May 21, 2018
Nicolas Maduro has been re-elected for a second term in office as Venezuela’s president in an election rejected as “illegitimate” by his main rival, who has also demanded that a repeat vote be held later this year.
With more than 90 percent of the ballots cast in Sunday’s presidential election counted, the National Election Council announced that incumbent Maduro had won another six-year term after securing 67.7 percent of the vote.
Maduro’s main challenger Henri Falcon came in second with 21.2 percent, followed by the president’s other rival, Javier Bertucci, who gained some 10 percent, said the Council’s head, Tibisay Lucena.
With the country’s mainstream opposition having boycotted the vote, the turnout was 46.1 percent, according to the board, which means 8.6 million out of the 20.5 million eligible voters took part in the election.
The ballots were recorded electronically, making the voting quick and easy. The presence of government troops around polling stations also ensured the safety of voters.
Some 150 international observers from 30 countries and international organizations were present in the Latin American country to monitor the process.
Maduro hails ‘historic’ win
When the results were released, Maduro’s supporters gathered outside his Miraflores presidential palace in downtown Caracas, celebrating his re-election with fireworks.
Maduro, surrounded by thousands of his supporters, also hailed his “popular victory,” saying, “This was a historic day! The day of a heroic victory! The day of a beautiful victory – of a truly popular victory.”
“Never before has a presidential candidate taken 68 percent of the popular vote,” he told the cheering crowd.
“The whole of Venezuela has triumphed! Democracy has triumphed! Peace has triumphed! Constitutionality has triumphed [These were] elections that were constitutional, legitimate and legal,” he said. “We have a president of the people! A working president!”
The president also called on the defeated challengers to join him for negotiations about the future of the country.
He said “permanent dialog” is needed with the entire opposition so that Venezuela could set aside political disputes.
Vote ‘lacks legitimacy’
However, before the official results were announced, Falcon said he would not recognize the vote for what he called irregularities, including widespread vote buying in favor of Maduro.
“As far as we are concerned there has been no election. There must be new elections in Venezuela,” he told reporters. “The process undoubtedly lacks legitimacy and as such we do not recognize it.”
Falcon, who broke with an opposition boycott to run for the election, also called for a fresh election to be held in November or December.
Several of Venezuela’s Latin American neighbors as well as the European Union also joined voices with Maduro’s challenger and said they would not recognize the results of the election.
They alleged that the conditions did not exist for the election to be free and fair.
However, former Spanish prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who is in Venezuela as an international observer, said he has no “doubt about the voting process.”
“It is an advanced automatic voting system. I come here to keep peace, coordinate and promote dialogue so as to improve the democratic mechanism here. What I need to do here is to see whether people can cast their ballots at their own discretion. Now we all see how people vote, don’t we?” he added.
The US also said it would not recognize the election and would actively consider oil sanctions on the country.
Washington has already imposed sanctions against Venezuela and blamed, together with its allies in the region and elsewhere, Maduro’s government for the country’s acute economic crisis.
On Saturday, the US ramped up pressure on Caracas by imposing new sanctions against the government’s top officials.
Maduro’s government, however, said the US was using new sanctions to sabotage the election.
It called Washington’s move as part of “a systematic campaign of aggression” by President Donald Trump’s administration and said they had no legal base.
EU Blocking Statute Against Anti-Iran US Sanctions May Fail to Protect Companies
Sputnik – May 19, 2018
BRUSSELS – The reinforcement and modification by EU of its Blocking Statute, which protects EU companies from the effects of sanctions by a third country, in order to prohibit companies from complying with US anti-Iran sanctions will not protect companies from fines for cooperating with Iranian projects, experts told Sputnik.
Since US President Donald Trump announced his decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal and reimpose its sanctions against the Islamic Republic, efforts by EU leaders have been focused on preserving the status quo in relations with Iran and mitigating the effects of the US withdrawal.
On Thursday, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker announced that the union will amend its Blocking Statute in order to include the US sanction imposed against Iran in the regulation. As soon as the amendments are adopted, EU businesses will be allowed not to comply with the US restrictions or even demand compensation for losses caused by the US sanctions.
TO AVOID US PENALTIES FIRMS SHOULD ABANDON BUSINESS WITH US
“Reactivating and even modifying the 1996 Blocking Statute will not shield EU companies, banks, and even countries from the US Department of Treasury imposing penalties. An EU company, bank, or government would have to do no business directly or indirectly with US counterparts in order to not feel the impact of US responses,” Dr. Jamsheed K. Choksy, the chair of Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University, said.
Choksy indicated that the safeguards that the EU leadership and national governments might potentially provide to the EU companies will not be able to make up for the losses caused by not doing business with the United States, which is a target market for EU firms.
Choksy explained that EU firms, in fact, had to choose between business with US entities or Iranian ones and business with US companies was far more economically viable and lucrative than business with Iran.
The head of the Europe of Nations and Freedom group in the European Parliament, Nicolas Bay, agreed with Choksy, saying that the importance of the US and Iranian markets for EU businesses was non-comparable.
POLITICAL ASPIRATIONS VS. ECONOMIC INTERESTS
According to the politician, Brussels’ attempts to demonstrate its political independence and significance by preserving the Iran nuclear deal without the United States have nothing to do with purely economic motives of the EU businesses.
“In the current state of the crisis, Jean-Claude Juncker, Donald Tusk and the European Union are only into communication to hide their weakness, because Brussels will not be able to force the banks, the car manufacturers, and all the European companies that depend on the American market to continue to trade with Iran,” Bay said.
Drieu Godefridi, a writer and former Director of the Hayek Institute, said that EU firms would not abandon pragmatic interests to appease EU politicians trying to recover from Trump’s neglect of transatlantic partnership.
“Whatever Mr. Juncker says now and the sabre-rattling by some, large and small European companies will never jeopardize their North American business to please the Brussels politicians. Europe is divided; we may be the largest world market but Europe is a political dwarf,” Godefridi said.
EUROPE WILL HAVE TO ABIDE
“My analysis when Trump announced the re-establishment of sanctions was that Europeans would have to abide. There is no way Europe could take a different path: America is the backbone of European defense in NATO, America is the first market of Germany and the third of France. No European bank can live without access to the dollar zone,” Godefridi predicted.
Jacques Leroy, a French international consultant on deals in the Middle East, believes that in the current situation, taking into account the importance of the US market for European countries, national governments will try to obtain some exemptions for their firms on an individual basis.
“Every European leader will try to obtain ‘special treatment’ from Washington, which is exactly what Donald Trump counts on. Divide to control. Europe will have to bow to US sanctions in the end,” Leroy stressed.
IRAN’S SALVATION LIES IN PARTNERSHIP WITH RUSSIA, CHINA
Since the majority of experts were convinced that the EU dependence on the United States would not allow Brussels to preserve its cooperation with Iran, they suggested that the Islamic Republic should seek refuge in partnership with more independent Russia ad China.
“I do not think [EU politicians] have the stomach to stand up to Trump. The United States wants Iran, Russia, and China to fall on their knees. These three countries must move closer to each other,” Mohammad Marandi, a professor at the University of Tehran, recommended.
His views were fully shared by Godefridi, who assumed that Russia and China were independent enough from the US economy to go their own way and trade with Iran.
With Iran sanctions Trump made Europeans look like the fools they are
By John Laughland | RT | May 18, 2018
The attacks by European leaders against US President Donald Trump are getting sharper by the day.
On the day Trump announced that he was ripping up the Iran deal, and that the US would impose sanctions on European companies trading with that country, the French finance minister Bruno Le Maire said that European states refused to be treated like “vassals” of the US.
At Aachen on 11 May, Emmanuel Macron effectively accused the US of blackmail. On 17 May, the president of the European Council, Donald Tusk, asked, “With friends like that (i.e. Trump), who needs enemies?”
The temperature only rose further when the French energy giant Total announced that it would pull out of a multi-billion dollar gas deal with Iran unless European diplomacy succeeds in obtaining a specific waiver from US sanctions. Other European behemoths including Allianz and Siemens have also announced either that they will wind down operations in Iran or that they will not start any new ones.
These statements show that Trump’s decision is a slap in the face for the EU politically, economically and – perhaps above all – ideologically. Politically, because both Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel made special trips to Washington to plead with Trump, to no avail whatever. Moreover, the EU is itself a signatory to the Iran deal, which it regards as a major diplomatic triumph from which it draws credibility: its disavowal by Trump is a deep insult to the diplomatic status of the EU as such.
Economically, because of the gigantic contracts which European companies could lose. For years, following the nearly $9 billion fine imposed by the US on Paribas in 2015, European companies and banks have been terrified of engaging in any business activity likely to attract the ire of the Americans. Deals with Russia, for instance, are shunned. The effect of this latest decision could be like many Paribas situations at once.
Ideologically, because the EU draws its entire legitimacy from the belief that by pooling sovereignty and by merging its states into one entity, it has advanced beyond the age when international relations were decided by force. It believes that it embodies instead a new international system based on rules and agreements, and that any other system leads to war. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this belief for European leaders; yet Donald Trump has just driven a coach and horses through it.
The angry statements by European leaders might lead one to think that we are on the cusp of a major reappraisal of trans-Atlantic relations. However, the reality is that the EU and its leaders have painted themselves into a corner from which it will be very difficult, perhaps impossible, to extricate themselves.
First, the links between the EU and the US are not only very long-standing, they are also set in stone. NATO and the EU are in reality Siamese twins, two bodies born at the same time which are joined at the hip. The first European community was created with overt and covert US support in 1950 in order to militarize Western Europe and to prepare it to fight a land war against the Soviet Union; NATO acquired its integrated command structure a few months later and its Supreme Commander is always an American.
Today the two organizations are legally inseparable because the consolidated Treaty on European Union, in the form adopted at Lisbon in 2009, states that EU foreign policy “shall respect” the obligations of NATO member states and that it shall “be compatible” with NATO policy. In other words, the constitutional charter of the EU subordinates it to NATO, which the USA dominates legally and structurally. In such circumstances, European states can only liberate themselves from US hegemony, as Donald Tusk said they should, by leaving the EU. It is obvious that they are not prepared to do that.
Second, EU leaders have burned their own bridges with other potential partners, especially Russia. Angela Merkel traveled to Russia on Friday but only a few weeks ago more than half of the EU member states expelled scores of Russian diplomats and encouraged non-EU European states like Ukraine and Montenegro to do the same, in retaliation for the poisoning in Salisbury of Sergei and Julia Skripal.
How is Mrs Merkel going to convince Mr Putin to join her in keeping Iran’s nuclear program under control if she officially thinks that Mr Putin is guilty of secretly stockpiling and using chemical weapons for assassinations in the West? Only a few weeks later, in mid-April, Britain and France, together with the US, attacked Syria on the basis that its army had used chemical weapons at Douma with Russian backing. If they try to turn on the charm now in Sochi or in Moscow, do they really expect the Russians can take them seriously?
Third, how can EU leaders complain about US sanctions against their companies when they themselves have applied sanctions against Russian companies causing major economic disruptions in that country? EU states have also introduced punitive sanctions against Syria since 2011, one of the biggest programs of sanctions ever, whose effect and purpose is to disrupt the activities of the Syrian state including its ability to provide public goods like health.
Britain and France, who are, with Germany, the European signatories of the Iran deal, have been pursuing regime change in Syria for half a decade. By what right do they protest now that the US administration is taking decisions whose goal is to provoke regime change in Iran?
As if these external issues were not bad enough, the EU is currently riven by internal divisions too. Donald Tusk may say “Europe must be united economically, politically and also militarily like never before … either we are together or we are not at all” but Europe is indeed not “together” at all. The Brussels commission is hounding Poland and Hungary on what are clearly internal political matters beyond the Commission’s remit; the EU is about to lose one of its most important member states; and a new government is going to take power in Rome whose economic policies (a flat tax at 15%) will blow the eurozone’s borrowing rules out of the water and perhaps cause Italy to leave the euro.
The Italian 5-Star / League government also wants an end to the EU sanctions against Russia; these are voted by a unanimity which, although fragile, has held until now but which, if the new power in Rome keeps its word, will shortly collapse. In other words, what Trump has done is to make the Europeans look like the fools they are. In circumstances in which the EU has placed all its eggs in one basket, a basket which Trump has now overturned, it will be impossible for it to come together. On the contrary, it is falling apart.
John Laughland, who has a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Oxford and who has taught at universities in Paris and Rome, is a historian and specialist in international affairs.
Featured Video
Thomas Fazi: NATO’s Hybrid Warfare – Deception & Permanent War
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
Book Review
The Zeolite Book — First Edition, 2026, Paperback
The volcanic mineral medicine will not patent — for the toxic burden medicine will not name
Lies are Unbekoming – October 30, 2026
Zeolite is old. It is in Roman concrete that has held for two thousand years. It’s in the water filters of ancient cisterns. It’s in the stomachs of Pacific livestock whose keepers knew, somehow, that this grey crumbling rock made the animals healthier. It’s in Soviet clinical protocols from the 1960s. It’s in the standard emergency response to the Chernobyl explosion.
In 1986, after the Chernobyl reactor failure, the Soviet Union manufactured and distributed natural zeolite at industrial scale — for soil remediation, for livestock feed, for human consumption, for the cleanup itself. Karl Hecht, who had been director of the Institute for Experimental and Clinical Pathophysiology at the Charité of Humboldt University Berlin, spent the six decades after that building the clinical research base — on silicon’s role in human health, on zeolite’s clinical safety, on its applications in ageing. In 2018, Pavelić and colleagues published a comprehensive clinical safety review of natural clinoptilolite in Frontiers in Pharmacology. In 2019, Mastinu analysed its binding affinities. In the Western medical literature, these works sit largely uncited.
What has not been treated at book length, until now, is how a volcanic mineral with six decades of Soviet clinical work behind it, two major peer-reviewed Western reviews, and ongoing clinical use across the former Eastern Bloc, remains almost entirely absent from Western medical practice — and what the toxic burden it’s meant to address actually is.
The Zeolite Book gathers the Soviet clinical record, the Western peer-reviewed studies, three contemporary practitioner voices, and three serious counterviews into one honest treatment. That’s why the book runs to seven appendices. 288 pages, four parts, three practitioner voices, three counterviews, seven appendices. The honest treatment is the argument.
Blog Roll
Aletho News- UAE security forces tortured, killed journalist for opposing Israel normalization: Report
- They Compared the Spice to the Drug. The Spice Won — Again. (Part 2)
- Thomas Fazi: NATO’s Hybrid Warfare – Deception & Permanent War
- Wrong, AP and NPR: Europe’s 50,000 Heat Deaths Are a Computer-Model Estimate, Not a Real Body Count
- Questioning Your Doctor Is Now Considered A Psychological Problem (Seriously)
- London tourism expo promotes Israeli agency linked to theft of Palestinian land
- Dockworkers launch global strike against Israeli and US military shipments
- Europe facing gas price shock – Gazprom chief
- Ukraine continues recruiting people with disabilities
- Weaponized Journalism: 2021 Sayer Ji Interview with NPR
- If Americans Knew
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
- No Tricks Zone
- Germany’s Green Energy Transition Becoming Increasingly Expensive…Another 6 Trillion Euros!
- Sudden Stratospheric Warming, Powerful El Niño Combination May Lead To Extreme Europe Cold, Energy Crisis!
- Two New Studies Find Thwaites Glacier Melt Cannot Be Driven By Human Activity Or A Warming Ocean
- E-Cars Reduce CO2 Emissions By Only 41% Compared To Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles
- Predictions Made By Renowned Climate Professor Over Past Decades Have Been Proven To Be Poor
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
