RUSSIA - Preparing Humanitarian Aid Op

Подготовка к гуманитарной операции на Юго-Востоке Украины. Preparing for the humanitarian operation in South-East of Ukraine. * SOURCE - Роман Тюков (ie Roman Square) - here.

UKRAINE - INTERNATIONAL-LED RED CROSS RELUCTANTLY AGREED TO BY US PUPPET GOVT

Ukraine OKs Red Cross-led international relief mission Posted: Monday, August 11, 2014 11:26 pm Associated Press | DONETSK, Ukraine — Ukrainian forces on Monday zeroed in on rebel strongholds as the government welcomed an international humanitarian relief mission into the rebellious east involving Russia, the United States and the European Union. The mission will be conducted under the auspices of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The organization said in a statement it is ready to facilitate the operation with the involvement of all sides concerned following a Russian initiative to provide humanitarian assistance to people in eastern Ukraine. It wasn’t clear when the deliveries would start. “The practical details of this operation need to be clarified before this initiative can move forward,” said Laurent Corbaz, the ICRC’s head of operations for Europe and Central Asia. Moscow had long urged Kiev to allow the aid delivery, but Ukraine and the West previously had opposed the move, fearing that it could serve as a pretext for sending Russian troops into rebel-held territory. Ukraine and the West have accused Moscow of arming and supporting the rebels fighting government troops in the east, a charge that the Kremlin has denied. The Red Cross said it has shared a document with Ukrainian and Russian authorities that stipulates all parties must guarantee the security of its staff during the operation and respect the organization’s neutrality. [How exactly is Russia supposed to do that when these are *independent* Ukraine citizens standing against the US puppet government of Ukraine?] The aid mission was announced after a conversation between U.S. President Barack Obama and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko Monday. The White House said that Obama and Poroshenko agreed that “any Russian intervention in Ukraine without the formal, express consent and authorization of the Ukraine government would be unacceptable and a violation of international law.” [More US propaganda.  Russia has not intervened.  On the contrary, it's the US that has stepped in to prop up a puppet government with US $5 BILLION - in aid of CORPORATE AMERICAN interests in Ukraine - which has already been divvied up and already has Biden's son ('Hunter' (sounds like a Palin name) installed in the country.] Shortly before that, Russia had declared that it was dispatching a humanitarian convoy into Ukraine in cooperation with the Red Cross without giving any details. President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, later was quoted by Russian news wires as saying that the convoy wouldn’t involve and military personnel.  [Ha, ha... Russia took the initiative and Obama and Poroshenko clowns trying to take credit, where they previously blocked aid to 3.9 million people.  Despicable.] Officials in Kiev took pains to specify Monday that the Ukrainian government was behind the humanitarian convoy initiative, and that Moscow was only one of several countries involved.  [Of course they did.  LMAO] “Apart from deliveries provided by Ukraine, the mission will feature an international component, including aid provided to the International Committee of the Red Cross by the United States, the EU, as well as Russia,” Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry said.  [The EU's involved in propping up the US puppet govt of Ukraine] The ministry also laid out specific conditions for the aid shipment, saying it should only pass through checkpoints controlled by the Ukrainian government. At least 100 kilometers (60 miles) of the long Russian-Ukrainian border is currently in rebel hands.  It said that the aid will be distributed by the Ukrainian authorities in the Luhansk region, one of the two mostly Russian-speaking rebel provinces.Some of the heaviest impact on civilians has been seen in Luhansk — the rebel-held capital of the Luhansk province that had a pre-war population of 420,000.  [That I would not agree to.  Who would trust them to distribute aid?] City authorities said Monday that the 250,000 residents remaining have had no electricity or water supplies for nine days.Food, medicine and fuel are also not being delivered, the Luhansk city government said. [...] Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov criticized the West for its reluctance to support the delivery of Russian aid earlier, but voiced hope for the success of the mission. “I hope that our Western partners will not put a spanner in the works,” he said. Alexander Zakharchenko, the leader of the self-proclaimed rebel government in the Donetsk region, said Monday that the insurgents were ready to observe a cease-fire to allow humanitarian aid to pass into Luhansk. The talk about the relief mission came as fierce fighting continued to rage in the east.  Donetsk city council spokesman Maxim Rovinsky said a rocket hit a high-security prison Monday, killing at least one inmate and leaving three others severely wounded.  [...] Both Ukrainian government forces and the pro-Russian rebels have deployed heavy Soviet-built weapons that lack precision.  [Oh, blame Ukraine govt shelling Ukraine people on 'lack of precision'.  *Eyeroll*. ] Apartments and other civilian buildings have frequently been hit, adding to the mounting death toll among civilians.  [Thank the Poroshenko US puppet government for that.] Many of those in Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine distrust the new central government in Kiev, which came to power after the February ouster of former President Viktor Yanukovych, whose power base was in eastern Ukraine. [His power base must have been wider, seeing he was the elected President.] Fighting began a month after Russia annexed Ukraine’s peninsula of Crimea in March.  [Oh, yes, tack on Crimea.  And let's forget about ousting of an *ELECTED* President, installation of a US puppet government, the disregard for agreement signed with Russia, the signing of bullshit EU agreement, the US division of spoils in Ukraine, and the oppression of a sizeable Eastern Ukraine population who want no part in the US puppet state.] EXTRACTS ONLY - FULL @ SOURCE SOURCE - NEWS JOURNAL - HERE.

The language of this article really got up my nose.

Poroshenko 'welcomed' humanitarian aid?  Please, the arsehole blocked it along with his arsehole US-UK and EU puppet masters.

The East Ukraine independence supporters are meanwhile described as the 'rebellious east', denying these people the voice they deserve and dismissing them, devalued and voiceless.  Arseholes.

Drawing Russia into this is just bullshit. As if Russia can guarantee (or in any way control) people in East Ukraine, who have independently stood against oppression.

Love how these arseholes change their tunes and take credit, as if humanitarian aid was all their idea, while they fought tooth and nail blocking aid. 

Disgusting, shameless pigs.  All of them.

Nobody's bothered to report on the Eastern Ukrainian people's David and Goliath struggle against oppressors.

The western press is truly fucked and maybe those extreme messages littering twitter are right:  why bother fighting for freedom of press when the press do nothing but SUPPRESS truth for their corporate masters.

Arseholes.

US - FEDERAL SPENDING - PRIVATE UNI PHOENIX STUDENT AID OUTSTRIPS MEAGRE ARIZONA STATE PUBLIC UNI FEDERAL STUDENT AID

Federal watchdog site suffers from missing data 9:44 p.m. CDT August 11, 2014 It would be easy to make fun of a federal accountability website that didn’t account for more than $619 billion. Too easy. But that doesn’t mean USASpending.gov gets a pass for the failings that are detailed in a new Government Accountability Office report. The website is a good idea that needs to get better. Much better. If you’ve never heard of the website, that counts as another problem. It can’t be a public resource if the public doesn’t know about it. Authorized by Congress in 2006 as a tool to track government spending, it was launched the next year. The site was touted as part of “a common-sense vision of government transparency and accessibility” by one of its congressional sponsors: Sen. Barack Obama. Fast forward. The GAO found that the Executive Office of the President failed to report $247 million in assistance programs it funded in 2012. White House officials said they thought the Department of Health and Human Services was responsible for reporting that spending. Oops. Meanwhile, HHS failed to report $544 billion of its own spending. Double oops. Throw on a few more billion here and there, and you get a promise of accountability that falls short. Under the law, government agencies are supposed to report contracts and grants. The website is searchable and yields some interesting tidbits. ............................................................................................................................................................................... For example: In fiscal 2013, Raytheon and Boeing were the top federal contractors in Arizona, pulling in $4.4 billion and $2.4 billion from Uncle Sam, respectively. That same year, the private University of Phoenix Inc. got $768 million worth of aid for students in the form of Pell Grants. Arizona State University pulled in $97 million. ............................................................................................................................................................................... There’s a lot researchers and interested citizens can do with statistics like that. Having them in an easy-to-find, easy-to-use form is a real public service and a powerful tool to hold government accountable. That is, if you can believe the numbers. The figures in these examples came from the website for 2013. The GAO report, based on 2012 figures, found that only 2 to 7 percent of the data it reviewed was “fully consistent with agencies’ records.” So who knows? To be fair, after the GAO informed agencies of the missing data, catch-up reports were filed. The GAO was not aiming to provide ammunition for the “government can’t do anything right” crowd. This wasn’t about gotcha. It was about monitoring performance and making recommendations on how to make them work better. That’s why it’s a mistake to just mock this website for its (many) problems. The goal of using technology to put information about government spending in the hands of the governed needs to be nurtured and perfected. This is especially important now, as the administration is implementing last year’s Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, which will increase the data available to the public. The GAO is recommending that the Office of Management and Budget, which oversees USASpending.gov, do more to clarify how and what agencies are supposed to report, and provide more oversight. It will take time to make this work right, but the intent is worthy of the Founding Fathers. Arizona Republic EXTRACTS ONLY - FULL @ SOURCE SOURCE - HERE.

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private University of Phoenix Inc. got $768 million worth of aid for students in the form of Pell Grants.

Arizona State University pulled in $97 million.

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Pell Grants - wikipedia - here.
US govt (federal) grants for students in financial need.

University of Phoenix - wikipedia - here.

For *profit* - institution

Check out what the uni spends on advertising:

Marketing and advertising

Apollo Group, University of Phoenix's parent company, spends between $376 million and $655 million per year on advertising and marketing, which includes the University of Phoenix brand. Much of this advertising is Internet advertising.

WTF?  It's their money, but couldn't that money be better spent?  That's obscene.

Arizona State University - wikipedia here - largest US *public* state uni by enrolment.

Like its research budget, the university's endowment continues to grow and now exceeds $500 million (2013).

Why is there an enormous disparity between the dollar amount of federal student aid going to a *for profit* Uni of Phoenix vs the *public* Arizona State?

Someone else might have to answer that, because I can't figure it out.

CIA OBAMA CENSORSHIP OF SENATE REPORT

CIA attempts to censor report into its use, abuse of torture Jamie Seidel, agencies News Corp Australia Network August 12, 2014 11:43AM CHARGED with using “brutal” interrogation methods, the CIA is now engaged in a desperate campaign to keep the details from becoming public. It’s even gone so far as to spy on the US Senate in its efforts. The political storm erupted early last week when powerful Intelligence Committee members protested over the Obama administration’s censorship of the 500-page executive summary of their findings of CIA ‘interrogation’ techniques. The full 6300 page document will never be made public. It was the end product of an examination expected to take six months. It’s since dragged on for five years. The report’s findings are said to be scathing. It is believed to state that the CIA’s ethical and legal breaches were “widespread” and “chilling”. It also is expected to rule that the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other ‘enhanced’ interrogation methods had not proved effective. But we now may never know for certain. Allegations are that the CIA is striving to delete enough key details to make the report incomprehensible — even though many of them have already been made public. “Try reading a novel with 15 per cent of the words blacked out. It can’t be done properly,” Senator Martin Heinrich said in his criticism of the attempted censorship. “Redactions are supposed to remove names or anything that could compromise sources and methods, not to undermine the source material so that it is impossible to understand.” So what is the CIA so keen to hide? What lies beneath the thousands of lines of black ink which will blank out so much of the summary? Why would the White House even allow the CIA to censor a report into its own misconduct? Ultimately it’s the US President who decides what should be marked as classified, and what should be public. The ball is now in President Barak Obama’s court. Here’s what US security analysis’s suspect the the CIA wants to hide: DESTRUCTION OF EVIDENCE: The whole Intelligence Committee investigation would never have happened if it was not for the destruction of key evidence. In one key incident that has been revealed, a CIA official destroyed more than 100 video recordings of the interrogations at the centre of the controversy. [...] WHEN IS TORTURE NOT TORTURE: The Bush administration insisted it wasn’t. The Obama administration says it was. At the heart of the report is whether or not the CIA knew their “enhanced” interrogation was actually torture ... [...] SUPPRESSING DETAILS: We know at least 10 types of torture the CIA applied to its captives. These were listed in the now infamous Justice Department “torture memo” and other evidence which came to light in a 2009 legal review of the allegations. But some speculate that the CIA is now particularly worried about the inherent cruelty of two previously unreported “improvised” interrogation methods ... [...] DELETING CODE NAMES: They’re just code names — acronyms and random words which are designed to disguise the subject to which they refer. But there’s something revealing even about these that the CIA wants to hide. One anonymous government source told US media the CIA was keen to blank-out any indication of name or place. This would remove any form of context for individual events. One would be indistinguishable from another. ... [...] REMOVING MENTION OF SOURCES: This may suggest something of an “own goal” by the CIA in its misinformation campaign. It appears much of the information said to have been gained via ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques was not. Instead, it was gathered by other means — means the CIA sought to mask behind the brutal face of torture. HIDING MEDIA MANIPULATION: It bears all the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda operation. Sound familiar? It should. It’s a favourite phrase used to invoke international fear and justify CIA actions. But the report appears to reveal that the organisation deliberately leaked false threats and success stories in order to justify the existence of its torture campaigns. Such revelations would deal a severe blow to the agency’s future credibility. EMBARRASSING INCIDENTS: Where the CIA Inspector General’s investigations into CIA behaviour credible? What of specific CIA actions — such as the reported abduction of the family (including a 12-year-old girl) of an opponent of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi? The CIA is keen to tout its successes — real or otherwise. But it has a long history of denial when it comes to failures. [...] WHITE HOUSE TO THE DEFENCE The Obama administration has sought to quash rising anger over the report’s redactions. “We tortured some folks,” President Obama conceded last week. “And we have to, as a country, take responsibility for that so that, hopefully, we don’t do it again in the future.” How censoring the report which is central for imposing such accountability upon the CIA achieves this goal is the issue. [...] EXTRACTS ONLY - FULL @ SOURCE Source - Herald Sun - here

Go to the source and check out the article in full.

Got some really cool pics, too.

There's a massive one of Brennan and I was right:  he looks mean.  LOL

Surprised this is news in Australia and that it's not exactly complimentary.

The public will never know what's going on or have a say on how their country is run.

Even when the government is supposedly moving towards accountability, they're hiding things from the public they're supposed to serve.

US - Population Largely Composed of Minorities

First time in history: US schools will not have white majority this autumn Published time: August 12, 2014 00:43 This autumn, the majority of students in public schools across the United States will be non-white for the first time in American history. The new data comes courtesy of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which estimates that 49.8 percent of all American students this coming school year will be non-Hispanic white students. At just under 50 percent, white students will still be the biggest racial group represented in US schools, but they will no longer make up the majority of all students in the country. According to the Associated Press, the NCES projects that nearly 25 percent of minority students will be Hispanic, while 15 percent will be black and another five percent Asian. Biracial and Native American students will make up the rest of the minority stake in schools. The news comes as the US population in general continues to undergo significant racial and ethnic changes. The US Census Bureau projects that minorities will make up a greater share of the US citizenry than whites by 2043, partially thanks to the fact that birth rates are going down or staying the same for whites – as well as for African Americans and Asians – while climbing higher for Hispanics. [...] More diverse schools will also highlight another problem in the US, since an earlier report found that segregated institutions are making something of a comeback. As RT reported back in May, only 23 percent of African American students attend schools that are majority white – the lowest percentage since 1968. More than 50 percent of Latino students attend majority Latino schools. According to researchers at the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, many of the gains made during integration have been reversed. That report followed one by the Annie E. Case Foundation, which stated that black, Native American, and Hispanic children still face the most barriers to success. Currently, about 25 percent of Hispanic and African American families live under the poverty line, with an annual income of $24,000 or less. The report found that barriers for these minority groups exist at birth and only widen afterwards. Noting that future US schools will be composed largely of minorities, the Casey Foundation’s Laura Speer said it is integral to America’s future that these children do not fall behind. “The kids of color in our country are absolutely critical to the future success of the United States,” she said. “They are going to be the majority of our work force and we can’t afford to lose the talent they have and could have in the future behind. We need them to be successful.” EXTRACTS ONLY - FULL @ SOURCE SOURCE - RT News - here.

What's the bet that minorities already make up the greater portion of US citizens.

The demographics figures in the US aren't reliable.

Super Moon Over Kremlin

SUPER MOON OVER KREMLIN Source - RT News - here.

I imagine the dead of Eastern Ukraine, beneath the expectant glow of this enormous, summertime moon.  

The dead, fallen, broken -- in this their last summer -- lie crumpled and oblivious to this divine, eternal beauty.

Her fleeting beauty is the delight of the living.

Yet she is also a companion presence to the unmoved, forever stilled, and forever silenced, dead.

Her magic has glowed upon mighty empires through the ages. 

Fallen empires turned to dust.

IRAQ - WASHINGTON CABAL - SECURE INTERESTS OF AMERICAN IMPERIALISM

The war cabal in Washington 11 August 2014 With a series of air strikes beginning Friday and continuing through the weekend, the United States has gone to war again in Iraq. This new imperialist military adventure has been launched in defiance of overwhelming popular opposition and without a shred of legal or constitutional authority. The decision to launch a new war was made by a handful of strategists of US imperialist policy within the military/intelligence apparatus, in league with the corporate and financial elite. It was made behind the backs of the American people, who have absolutely no say in the policies, including going to war, that impact their lives. President Obama’s Thursday night announcement authorizing the launching of air strikes and other actions against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) came just one day after Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies published an analysis calling for an escalation of US military operations in Iraq. Cordesman and his Washington DC think tank occupy a prominent place within the network of intelligence and military strategists who determine US foreign policy. Cordesman and his like are involved in a permanent conspiracy against the wishes and interests of the broad mass of the American people, in which the president serves as executor and front-man. Their decisions to launch wars and subvert targeted foreign governments are dutifully approved by the leaders of both big business parties in Congress. The corporate-controlled media is assigned the task of dispensing propaganda and disinformation in support of militarism and war. Opinion polls show that 71 percent of the American population regards the 2003-2011 Iraq War with hostility. But what the vast majority of the American people think and feel has no bearing on the policies and decisions of the key actors in Washington. There is no longer even the formality of public hearings, debate or a congressional vote. No explanation is offered as to how and why a country that had no Al Qaeda presence until the 2003 invasion, supposedly carried out to fight Al Qaeda terrorism, has been largely overrun by an Al Qaeda offshoot. There is no explanation for the terrible squandering of Iraqi lives, with over a million killed, and American lives, with tens of thousands killed and wounded, or the waste of trillions of dollars to finance the slaughter. The politicians and media are silent on the role of the CIA in promoting and aiding ISIS and similar Al Qaeda-linked forces and using them as proxy fighters in the US wars for regime-change in Libya and Syria. [...] Obama declared Saturday that the intervention in Iraq would go on for months, if not longer. It thus represents an open-ended commitment of the military and financial resources of the US government. Tens of billions of dollars will be thrown into the furnace of war to secure the interests of American imperialism in the vast oil resources of the region. [...] EXTRACT - FULL @ SOURCE SOURCE - WSWS - here.

No say about going to war?

Sounds about right.