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Judge in FBI Raid on Donald Trump’s House Represented Several Associates of Jeffrey Epstein – report

Bruce Reinhart, the Florida judge who signed off on FBI raiding Donald Trump’s house, used to represent Jeffrey Epstein's employees in court. (Daily Mail)

Reinhart became a magistrate judge four years ago after spending 10 years in the private sector where he worked with some of Epstein's staff.

Namely, he helped the disgraced financier's pilots, his scheduler Sarah Kellen, and a woman Epstein called his “Yugoslavian sex slave” - Nadia Marcinkova.

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❗Lufthansa extends suspension of Russian airspace use until March 25 next year

The largest German airline has also extended the suspension of flights to Ukraine until the same time, a website statement indicating that "at present, the airspace over Ukraine is closed, flights are not carried out."

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Finnish Govt Site Downed in Cyberattack - reports

Hacker Group ‘NoName057’ has claimed responsibility for a Denial of Service (DoS) attack on the Finnish Government website – reportedly in response to country’s request to join NATO.

The site currently shows a “No IP address found” message.

On their Telegram channel, the group said, ‘We have decided to pay a ‘friendly’ visit to neighboring Finland… and dropped a DoS on its parliament’s website’.

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Sanctions Nullified by China-Russia Trade (reports)

Chinese exports to Russia are skyrocketing - filling the void created by sanctions and the exodus of Western brands - as the Chinese Customs authority reports a jump of one third from July. (Bloomberg)

Shipments to Russia have grown 22% as bi-lateral trade reaches $97.71bn - up 29% on a yearly basis.

It is expected that the foreign trade between China and Russia this year would surpass the level of 2021 when the bilateral trade stood at $146.87bn, a record high, the Global Times reported Sunday.

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 The Russian Navy’s Great Game
Strategic Culture Foundation (RSS)

No matter what firepower NATO’s navies can bring to bear in Russia’s eastern backyard, they cannot prevail.

When Russia’s navy recalls both the Anglo-German naval arms race, which helped precipitate the Great War and the Great Game Tzarist Russia played in Asia against Britain, they must feel confident about the future.

Russian President Putin no doubt had those precedents in mind when he recently told Russia’s admirals that Russia’s already formidable navy would be expanded to protect her entire coastline and project power from there to wherever it is needed. Although the Norwegian, Barents, Kara, Laptev, East Siberian, Chukchi, Bering, Okhotsk and Japan Seas add up to a lot of water, Russia, with the right tactics, is more than up to the job of protecting her coastlines and projecting power from them.

Not only would most of those seas be terrible vectors for any hostile power attacking Russia but NATO’s posturing towards North Korea and China has made the defensive job of the Russian navy infinitely easier. Instead of just concentrating on tweaking the tail of the Russian tiger, NATO got the brainwave of sending Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan to antagonize the entire Chinese navy. Although that is good news for NATO’s arms industry and for whoever else is in on Pelosi’s latest short trading Wall Street scam, it does indicate a major shift in the world’s strategic goalposts because-China, with Iran’s impressive navy, is now solidly and permanently in Russia’s camp. No more divide and conquer NATO games there.

And so, when the Chinese navy finishes their fun and games in the waters around Taiwan, Japan’s formidable navy will have to take stock and decide whether it should follow the U.S. 7th Fleet lemming-like into a confrontation with China or whether it should look out for number one, for Japan.

Although the Japanese Imperial Navy acquitted itself well at the beginning and the middle of the last century, next time will be very different as it could find itself standing almost alone against two blue water navies, that of Russia and the emerging one of the Peoples Republic of China. And all to satiate Americans like Wall Street inside trader Nancy Pelosi. Japan, which is in no position to project hard power, should sit this one out as there are just too many unknowns, one of which is the Russian navy.

Should matters escalate in Russia’s eastern backyard, in, say, the Sea of Japan or the Taiwan Strait, what is to stop the Russian navy placing itself in the middle of the affray as the Soviet submarine fleet did in 1971, when the U.S. 7th fleet along with Perfidious Albion’s HMS Eagle and HMS Albion stood poised to sink the entire Indian navy in the Bay of Bengal? When the Soviet submarines surfaced in front of them, the British and American navies were forced to beat an ignominious retreat, just as they and their German poodle will have to retreat from the waters around Taipei once China spits the dummy.

No matter what firepower NATO’s navies can bring to bear in Russia’s eastern backyard, they cannot prevail. As there will be no Battle of Jutland or Battle of Leyte Gulf turkey shoot this time round,...

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Pho­tos: Dead­ly fire at Cuba’s main oil ter­mi­nal in Matan­zas
News | Today's latest from Al Jazeera (RSS)

Huge columns of fire rose into the sky and thick black smoke bel­lowed for days, dark­en­ing the sky as far away as Ha­vana.
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Published On 9 Aug 2022

Lula v Bol­sonaro: Ten­sions rise in Brazil as elec­tion nears
News | Today's latest from Al Jazeera (RSS)

With ri­val Lula lead­ing in pres­i­den­tial polls ahead of Oct 2 elec­tions, ob­servers fear Bol­sonaro will not ac­cept de­feat.
Published On 9 Aug 2022

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News | Today's latest from Al Jazeera (RSS)

Last month was one of the warmest Julys on record, says UN
UN says tem­per­a­tures near­ly half a de­gree above av­er­age last month, as EU mon­i­tor records record-low Antarc­tic sea ice.
Published On 9 Aug 2022

Live: Funeral takes place for Dillon Quirke, brother and sister laid to rest
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Stay up to date with all the latest news with this three-minute video update.

British postal workers to hold four days of strikes over pay
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British postal workers will hold four days of strikes in August and September in protest over pay, marking the latest announcement of industrial ac

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UK staring at blackouts and gas cuts amid extreme cold in January
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Predicting several days of winter where the colder weather could be coupled with gas shortages, the UK will reportedly undergo organized blackouts

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Under Beijing's national security law, four Hong Kong locals arrested for sedition
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Tax returns of Donald Trump must be turned over to congressional committee, appeals court rules
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Joe Biden signs documents supporting Sweden and Finland's bid to join NATO
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A week after Senate ratified the entrance of nordic countries Finland and Sweden into North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), US President Joe B

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 Is Taiwan’s Independence Worth War?
Strategic Culture Foundation (RSS)

Unlike in the Cold War, time is not necessarily on the side of the United States and its allies.

Patrick J. BUCHANAN

When a man knows he is about to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully, said Dr. Samuel Johnson.

If there is any benefit to be realized from the collision between China and the U.S. over Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan, it is this: America needs to reflect long and hard upon what it is we will fight China to defend in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea. China, after all, is a nuclear-weapons nation with a manufacturing base larger than our own, an economy equal to our own, a population four times ours and fleets of warships larger in number than the U.S. Navy.

An air-naval-and-missile war in the Western Pacific and East Asia would be no cakewalk. A massive barrage of anti-ship and hypersonic missiles launched by China could cripple and conceivably sink the U.S. carrier Ronald Reagan now in the South China Sea. The Reagan carries a crew of thousands of sailors almost as numerous as the U.S. casualty lists from both Pearl Harbor and 9/11, the worst attacks in and on the U.S. outside of such Civil War battles as Gettysburg and Antietam.

What in East Asia or the Western Pacific would justify such losses? What would justify such risks?

Since President Richard Nixon’s trip to China, and President Jimmy Carter’s abrogation of the mutual defense treaty with the Republic of China on Taiwan in 1979, the U.S. is not obligated to come to the defense of Taiwan against China, which claims that island the size of Maryland as “part of China.”

Our military posture has been one of “strategic ambiguity.” We will not commit to go to war to defend Taiwan, nor will we take the war option off the table if Taiwan is attacked. But if the U.S. went to war to defend Taiwan, what would it mean? We would be risking our own security and possible survival to prevent from being imposed on the island of Taiwan the same regime lately imposed on Hong Kong without any U.S. military resistance.

If Hong Kong, a city of 7 million, can be transferred to the custody and control of Beijing without resistance from the U.S., why should it be worth a major U.S. war with China to prevent that same fate and future from befalling 23 million Taiwanese?

The retort comes instantly. Allow China to take Taiwan without U.S. resistance, and our treaties to fight for the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand become suspect. Belief in the U.S. commitment to fight for the nations of East Asia and the Western Pacific would dissipate. The entire architecture of Asian defense against Communist China could disintegrate and collapse.

If we allowed Taiwan to be taken by China without intervening, it is argued, the value of U.S. commitments to fight to defend scores of allies in Europe and Asia would visibly depreciate. U.S. credibility would suffer a blow as substantial as the loss of South Vietnam in 1975.

The fall of Saigon was followed by the loss of Laos and Cambodia to communism, the overthrow of the shah, the Iranian hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the strategic transfer of Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua and Grenada to the Soviet bloc, and the rise of Euro-communism on the Old Continent.

Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, and the bellicose reaction of Beijing, should raise other relevant questions. If this should lead to a U.S.-China war, what would we be fighting for? And what would victory look like?  A restoration of the status quo ante? Permanent independence for Taiwan, which would r...

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 When Will Foreign Leaders Start Asking to Speak to America’s REAL Government?
Strategic Culture Foundation (RSS)

By Caitlin JOHNSTONE

During the furor over Nancy Pelosi’s incendiary Taiwan visit last week, I was watching an appearance by Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp on the show Rising which brought up the under-discussed point that US officials going to Taipei is actually a continuation of a trend that had already been happening under the Trump administration.

DeCamp pointed out that China began regularly flying planes into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone after Trump administration officials made similar visits to Pelosi’s.

“That started happening regularly after August 2020 when President Trump sent Alex Azar to Taiwan,” DeCamp said. “He was his health secretary. He was the highest-level cabinet official to visit Taiwan since 1979. The following month, in September 2020, they sent Keith Krach. He was the undersecretary for economics in the State Department, and he was the highest-level State Department official to visit Taiwan since 1979. So these are unprecedented steps, and since then we’ve seen more Chinese military activity in the region.”

Later in the interview Rising’s Briahna Joy Gray asked DeCamp if these escalations against China from the Trump administration into the Biden administration were a “kind of blob foreign policy decision that is not partisan.” DeCamp explained how in 2018 the US military began officially transitioning from emphasis on “counter-terrorism” in the Middle East toward “great power competition” with China and Russia, with the ultimate target being China.

“If you look at all the really hawkish think tanks in Washington that are funded by the arms industry, it’s all about this so-called great power competition,” DeCamp said. “Russia right now seems to be the more imminent issue I guess, but China seems to be in the long run. And we’ve seen this from just about every government agency — the Pentagon, the FBI, the State Department, the CIA — say that China is the long-term so-called threat. And we’ve seen Biden say this, and this is kind of the name of the game in Washington right now.”

In the lead-up to Pelosi’s visit, Moon of Alabama spotlighted this strange phenomenon where US foreign policy moves along the same trajectory regardless of political party or election results with a collection of recent articles that have all raised this subject independently. This one from Naked Capitalism stands out the most right now:...

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