North Korea War Plan: Chrystia Freeland is more dangerous than Tony Blair

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by Cameron Pike

The day before the Foreign Ministers’ meeting on Security and Stability in Vancouver on January 16, 2018, a forum was held at the University of British Columbia’s Institute of Asian Research entitled “Getting North Korea Right:  Canadian Options and Roles”.  This was a publicly held event with the “expert” “talking heads” of think-tanks. The moderator was an Asian International Relations expert, Dr. Paul Evans, who is now the head of the Institute of Asian Research. 

The five speakers were Eric Walsh: Canadian Ambassador to the Republic of South Korea, Scott Snyder: Senior Fellow and Director of the Program on U.S.-Korea Policy, and New York Council of Foreign Relations, Kyung-Ae Park: Korea Foundation Chair, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs Director, and Canada-DPRK Knowledge Partnership Program, Brian Job:  Professor of Political Science, UBC, Brian Gold: Department of History and Classics, University of Alberta. All panel participants were…

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If you know anyone who still thinks the White Helmets are “heroes” – show them this 7m video

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Vanessa Beeley presents a condensed overview of the evidence for the White Helmets being a creation of Western governments embedded with terrorist factions inside Syria. Show this to anyone who still can’t believe our leaders would be cynical and psychopathic enough to nominate mercenaries, fakers and mass-murderers for a Nobel prize, or that our media would be craven enough to let this grotesque lie go unquestioned

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Is Ukraine gearing up for full scale war in East?

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by Gilbert Doctorow at Consortium News

A new draft law adopted by the Ukrainian Parliament and awaiting Petro Poroshenko’s signature threatens to escalate the Ukrainian conflict into a full-blown war, pitting nuclear-armed Russia against the United States and NATO

While much of America’s – and the world’s – attention focused this weekend reflecting on Donald Trump’s first year in the Oval Office, holding one-year anniversary events for the historic Women’s March and drawing up balance sheets of his promises and achievements, Russia has had a rather different issue on the front-burner: a possible war with Ukraine.

The situation in the Donbass region of south-eastern Ukraine has been a feature of Russia’s political talk shows for the past couple years, along with the military campaign in Syria and more recently the stages in the preparation for presidential elections on March 18.

Focus on the Donbass conflict increased in the closing weeks…

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Documentary: Ukraine on Fire (2016)

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The original English language version of the 2016 documentary Ukraine on Fire, covering the 2014 coup d’etat, which was all but denied exposure on its release, is now available for viewing in some regions. For those who still can’t access it, there is currently a version on Youtube which you can watch below, but we encourage everyone who can do so to purchase a legitimate copy in support of the filmmakers

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Google hiring 10,000 reviewers to censor YouTube content

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by Zaida Green, via WSWS

Google is escalating its campaign of internet censorship, announcing that it will expand its workforce of human censors to over 10,000, the internet giant announced on December 4. The censors’ primary focus will be videos and other content on YouTube, its video-sharing platform, but will work across Google to censor content and train its automated systems, which remove videos at a rate four times faster than its human employees.

Human censors have already reviewed over 2 million videos since June. YouTube has already removed over 150,000 videos, 50 percent of which were removed within two hours of upload. The company is working to accelerate the rate of takedown through machine-learning from manual censorship, according to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki in an official blog post.

The hiring drive by Google is yet another advance in the campaign against any expression of political opposition. Other social media giants have…

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How the West Could Destabilize Russia

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by Denis Churilov

Russian March 2018 Presidential Elections are approaching. Putin has recently announced that he will run as a candidate. The global players who don’t want Putin to stay in power will likely do everything possible to get rid of him. Let’s explore some possible pressure points and try to predict the most unpleasant developments.

The measures to destabilize Russia amid the elections are most likely to be complex and could potentially include:

1. Exacerbating situation in Eastern Ukraine/Donetsk People’s Republic and Lugansk People’s Republic. A coordinated, big scale assault on break-away regions by the Kiev government and ultra-nationalist battalions, if successful, could be exploited informationally by evoking a public discourse inside Russia about Putin betraying the people of Donbass/Novorossia, or being incapable of helping them, which could potentially decrease his approval ratings domestically. There are reports of soldiers from the US National Guard, namely the New York’s 27th…

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#blamePutin continues to be the media’s dominant hashtag

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by VT

Vladimir Putin finally confesses his entire responsibility for everything bad that has ever happened since the beginning of time

The decline of the falsely self-described “quality” media outlet The Guardian/Observer into a deranged fake news site pushing anti-Russian hate propaganda continues apace. Take a look at this gem:

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has accused prominent British businessman Bill Browder of being a “serial killer” – the latest extraordinary attempt by the Kremlin to frame one of its most high-profile public enemies.

But Putin has not been reported anywhere else as making any recent statement about Browder whatever, and the Observer article makes no further mention of Putin’s supposed utterance or the circumstances in which it was supposedly made.

As the rest of the article makes clear, the suspicions against Browder were actually voiced by Russian police investigators and not by Putin at all.

The Observer fabricated…

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More ‘Fake News,’ Alas, From the New York Times

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From The American Conservative via Information Clearing House

Disregarding President Trump’s insistent claim that the establishment press propagates “fake news” requires a constant effort—especially when a prestigious outlet like the New York Times allows itself to be used for blatantly fraudulent purposes.

I cherish the First Amendment. Mark me down as favoring journalism that is loud, lively, and confrontational. When members of the media snooze—falling for fictitious claims about Saddam’s WMD program or Gaddafi’s genocidal intentions, for example—we all lose.

So the recent decision by Times editors to publish an op-ed regarding Paul Manafort’s involvement in Ukraine is disturbing. That the Times is keen to bring down Donald Trump is no doubt the case. Yet if efforts to do so entail grotesque distortions of U.S. policy before Trump, then we are courting real trouble. Put simply, ousting Trump should not come at the cost of whitewashing the follies that contributed…

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The “Non-Citizens” of the Baltic States: Α European Scandal nobody speaks about!

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by Tatjana Zdanoka, 4 October 2017, via DefendDemocracyPress

The negotiations on Brexit are attracting a lot of attention. In particular, the possible erosion of the rights of around three million EU-27 citizens living in Britain is a major cause for concern.

The European Parliament resolution adopted on 3 October states that “the withdrawal agreement must incorporate the full set of rights citizens currently enjoy, such that there is no material change in their position”.

The main author of this text, Mr Guy Verhofstadt, the EP Brexit Coordinator, argues that such an approach – not to lower the level of citizens’ rights – is “the goal of democracy”. But why was the very same principle ignored when another “exit” took place in Europe? It was the exit of the Baltic states from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1990-1991 when a million and a half citizens who…

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Vladimir Putin’s 17 years in power: The scorecard

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by Alex Krainer, The Naked Hedgie

Editors: Today, October 7, 2017, Russia celebrates the 65th birthday of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.  To mark the occasion, we are posting Alex Krainer’s review of Putin’s achievements since 2000.

Mr. Putin can’t seem to get a break in the western media. I watched his recent interview with CBS’s Megyn Kelly with her tiresome, boring questions like, “did Russia interfere in our election,” “did your ambassador meet with Trump’s election officials,”  “isn’t it true that you’re a corrupt murderous thug,” etc. Only in response to Kelly’s last question did Mr. Putin get to name a handful of his achievements in Russia. But someone ought to better prepare his talking points on this score. The excerpt below from my upcoming book summarizes how Russia has changed during the 17 years since Mr. Putin has been at the helm.

On 26th July 2014 British magazine “The…

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