Russia

NOVANEWS “Inconsistencies” in bin Laden Death By Colonel Gene Khrushchev “It took Obama two years to find his own birth certificate, how long will it take to find Usama bin Laden’s death certificiate?”   YouTube - Veterans Today -

NOVANEWS www.thepassionateattachment.com Ken Silverstein has a very interesting piece in Salon magazine on the lobbyists for Georgia who “wine and dine eager Washington journalists in a campaign to undo Obama’s ‘reset’ on Russia.” Silverstein, a contributing editor for Harper’s magazine, explains how Randy Scheunemann’s Orion Strategies creates a media echo chamber on Georgia and Russia: Essentially it works like this: Tbilisi’s lobbyists generate contacts and information that they feed to sympathetic journalists. Orion frequently arranges interviews with Georgian officials and, not infrequently, stories centering on their charges magically appear soon afterward. Orion has wined and dined some reporters on its tab or picked up their travel expenses. There’s certainly nothing illegal ab...

NOVANEWS washingtonpost.com Having decided to snatch back his country’s reins, Vladimir Putin promised Thursday to invigorate Russian industry, suggesting that domestic production was a more important goal than membership in the free-market World Trade Organization. Taking the stage several hours into an investors’ conference where most of the talk focused on the tough economic times Russia faces in the coming months, the prime minister spoke instead about his plans to modernize the military, health care, education, roads, airports and housing, while nurturing new diversified industrial sectors. The nation would pay for it all, he said, by cutting “unnecessary” construction and corruption. His military overhaul alone carries a $600 billion price tag. Putin — already the most powerful p...

Russia has a strong financial stake in the survival of the Assad regime. But it also opposes Western intervention on principle – particularly in the wake of NATO’s Libya campaign. Christian Science Monitor Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal crackdown on the popular uprising against his rule, which has left some 2,600 people dead since March, has earned him opprobrium across the globe. But international efforts to pressure his regime further are unlikely to be enough to bring it down, so long as Mr. Assad retains the support of one powerful global player: Russia. Skip to next paragraph A traditional ally with trade ties worth close to $20 billion, Russia has a strong financial stake in the Assad regime’s survival. But Moscow’s support goes beyond pocketbook issues. As a vast coun...

NOVANEWS  by Trowbridge H. Ford In explaining or assessing any intelligence operation or series of them, it is most important to determine not only what was being attempted, and also by whom, especially if they are suspected of having dubious reliability. Then the explanation may well be just another cover story, and its real outcome far different from what obvious accounts contend. The role of double agents in the whole process is often either overstated or more importantly not even noticed. And the process becomes even more complicated if the operator has even more personas. Too often most successful spies or convenient fallguys are called double agents rather than what they really were. Margaretha Zelle, better known as the famous femma fatale Mata Hari, is seen traditionally as the ar...

NOVANEWS  Russians Recalculate MidEast Moves Eric Walberg Gives Us a Peek Into the Russian Bear Debates by   Jim W. Dean,  VT  Editor Staying up to date on interntational events these days is a superhuman task. And a good understanding of the behind the scenes struggles and machinations remains almost a dream because it requires so much more background geopolitical depth than most have time to invest. Veterans Today has focused on bridging that great divide for our readers, making the dream a reality with our own in house material spearheaded by our bionic editor Gordon Duff and his huge archive here.  Some of the current VT people go all the way back to those days and I wanted you to be aware of that legacy because no one else has it. Gordon was point man on the AOL Military section wa...

NOVANEWS   MOSCOW — In an interview Friday that was timed to the third anniversary of Russia’s war with Georgia, President Dmitri A. Medvedev said top United States officials played a key role in events that touched off the war, and offered a withering assessment of a recent Senate resolution on Georgia’s behalf, which he said reflected “the personal tastes of certain elderly members of the Senate.” They were the toughest remarks Mr. Medvedev has directed toward the United States in months, heightening the impression that the rapprochement between the two countries — the so-called reset — is beginning to unravel. Mr. Medvedev dismissed as “pure provocative nonsense” the notion that a Russian military intelligence officer was linked to an explosion outside the American Embassy in ...

NOVANEWS Reuters Russia criticised on Monday the United States and other countries that have recognised the rebel National Transitional Council as Libya’s legitimate government, saying they were taking sides in the civil war. Setting Russia apart from the West, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said nations that recognised the rebel National Transition Council (TNC) were pursuing a “policy of isolation” he suggested could undermine efforts to end the five-month war. “Those who declare such recognition stand fully on the side of one political force in a civil war,” Lavrov said. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the recognition at a meeting in Turkey on Friday of an international contact group on Libya, which is seeking a political solution that would remove Muammar Gaddafi fr...