Russia To Give Syrian Army High-Precision Weapons, New Concerns Over N Korea's EMP Potential, U.S., China Military Planes Come Inadvertently Close Over S China Sea

Russia to give Syrian army high-precision weapons

Moscow signaled on Wednesday, February 8, that it has started - or is about to start - supplying precision weapons to the Syrian military in order to boost its capabilities against the Islamic State organization.

It came in an announcement by Ilyas Umakhanov, deputy chairman of the Russian Federation Council, who said, "Russia will continue an asymmetrical response (to terrorism) in Syria, which may include the regrouping of forces and means…and of course the supply of high-precision weapons to the Syrian government."  

He added that “It is impossible to defeat terrorism only by efforts of one country. Terrorism has assumed a global character and, having achieved obvious victory in one place, there is no reason to create additional vacuums where terrorists can resume military operations.”

It is clear that Umakhanov was referring to two main topics:

1. Military cooperation by the US, Russia, Syria and Turkey in the war against ISIS, with the first signs already visible on the fronts in northern and eastern Syria.

2. Russian estimation of the need to supply the Syrian military with the most advanced weapons to ramp up its capabilities to the same level as those of the other militaries taking part in the war against ISIS in Syria.

According to Russian media reports on Feb. 8, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said recently that more than 160 types of advanced weapons have been tested in the course of Moscow’s military intervention in Syria, which started in September 2015. The reports did not specify where or when Shoigu made the comment.

They include small drones armed with precision bombs; shoulder-fired, laser-guided antitank and antiaircraft missiles; “loitering munitions” which follow their targets after being dropped from planes; small unmanned vehicles for clearing tunnels; advanced night vision equipment; laser and infrared sights; intelligence systems for locating targets; and long-range sniper rifles.

But now that the Russians have announced that they will provide those weapons to the Syrian military, it is obvious that some of the arms are bound to fall into the hands of the Iranians and Hizballah.

New alarms sounded over North Korea’s EMP potential

Alarms once again are being sounded over North Korea’s capability to launch satellites that could carry a nuclear weapon and be detonated at a high altitude over America, creating an extremely powerful electromagnetic pulse that would knock out the nation’s vulnerable electrical grid system, according to a report from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.

It is on that grid system that the nation’s life-sustaining critical infrastructures, from food supplies and utility services to financial and even communications, depend.

Pyongyang already has demonstrated it can launch such satellites. Two already are in orbit, even though experts don’t know what the satellites are doing.

Peter Pry, who already has expressed concerns about Pyongyang’s satellite launches, has warned that North Korea would not need a missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland. Instead, it could put a nuclear weapon on a satellite that could be detonated on command over the United States.

Pry, who is executive director of the congressional advisory Task Force on National and Homeland Security and U.S. Nuclear Strategy Forum, has said Pyongyang has been testing smaller nuclear kiloton warhead that emit greater amounts of gamma rays, a form of electromagnetic energy, rather than devices with physical destructive capability.

Now Jim Oberg, who is one of the few American scientists to visit North Korea’s Sohae space launch site in the northwest corner of the country, has expressed similar concerns about the content of North Korean satellites.

ISIS reportedly responsible for rockets fired from Egypt into Eilat 



A branch of Islamic State in Egypt's Sinai reportedly claimed responsibility for firing rockets from Egypt into Israel on Wednesday night.
According to reports in Gazan media early Thursday, the Sinai branch of Islamic State was responsible for a barrage of missiles at Eilat, on Israel's southernmost city.


In a message published to the media, ISIS proudly stated they there were indeed responsible for the fire that was directed at southern Israel late on Wednesday, boasting of their intentions to commit further attacks. 

"With the grace of God alone, a military squad fired several Grad rockets at encampments of Jewish usurpers in the city of Um al-Rashrash [Eilat] in order to teach the Jews and the crusaders that a proxy war will not avail them of anything." 

Threatening to proceed with the aggression, the message went on to say that "the future will be more calamitous with Allah's permission."

During the incident, four projectiles were fired into southern Israel and three were intercepted by the Iron Dome missile defense system, according to the IDF Southern Command. 

U.S., China military planes come inadvertently close over South China Sea

A U.S. Navy P-3 plane and a Chinese military aircraft came close to each other over the South China Sea in an incident the Navy believes was inadvertent, a U.S. official told Reuters on Thursday.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the aircraft came within 1,000 feet (305 meters) of each other on Wednesday in the vicinity of the Scarborough Shoal, between the Philippines and the Chinese mainland.

The official added that such interactions between Chinese and American aircraft are infrequent, with only two occurring in 2016.

Unprecedented Moves Towards War With China Would “Upend Supply Routes, Trigger Global Recession”

Economic tensions are tipping over into military ones.

Warships have sailed, and the rhetoric of Trump’s officials has shifted dramatically from the previous era.

The larger threat to the petrodollar and the continuance of U.S. hegemony has been put face-to-face with a China gaining in power and confidence, and ready to depose American dominance. It has become bold enough to make fresh claims on territory, and the U.S. has taken it as a call to war.

How much more pressure will this situation take before it explodes into a deadly confrontation? And why is world war three suddenly back on the table?

The Trump Administration is starting off on a highly aggressive posture with China – with taboo calls to Taiwan, loose talk from President Trump (since the campaign trail) about a trade war with China, and now stern warnings from Secretary of State Tillerson about China’s activities in the South China Sea.

It might come off as just a scolding, if not for the huge military assembly surrounding the region, and the unprecedented level of ICBM missile testing and genuine threats/predictions of war to come. Someone clearly means business:

If a conflict with China became real, became tangible, Americans would feel the repercussions in a very short span of time, even if the U.S. military won the conflict, as most experts predict.

The cost of such instability would be great to people everywhere.

Prepare as best you can; things are about to become unpredictable, and quite possibly unstable. There will be a lot of talk, but we will have to wait and watch to see if anything actually happens.

Settler group says 421,000 Israelis now living in West Bank



The number of Israeli settlers living in the West Bank surged past 421,000 in 2016, a settler group said Thursday.

The Yesha Council said the number of settlers in the West Bank had grown by 3.9 percent since 2015, twice the rate of population growth inside Israel.

Its figures exclude residents of Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, home to more than 200,000 Israelis.

While Israel considers a united Jerusalem to be its capital and applied Israeli law to areas of the city captured in the 1967 Six Day War, Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state. The US and much of the international community says the city’s status should be determined in peace talks between the sides.

The Yesha Council said growth had slowed slightly since 2012 because of building freezes by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government under international pressure, particularly from the Obama administration.

Since the inauguration of US President Donald Trump in January, Israel has approved some 5,500 homes in the West Bank and over 500 homes in East Jerusalem.

The Knesset passed a law Monday, known as the Regulation Law, allowing Israel to expropriate private Palestinian land on which Jewish settler outposts were built. It legalizes dozens of wildcat outposts and thousands of settler homes in the West Bank.

Soros plans endless, orchestrated anti-deportation protests

Gheen said protests like this are being planned by Soros groups and widely reported by the establishment media in an effort to generate sympathies for illegal immigrants.

He said the protests will strategically focus on immigrants who appear the most sympathetic.

“That’s why they are focused on a female and mother that is being deported,” he said. “You won’t see them protesting the deportations of male illegal immigrants or the hardcore looking drug smugglers because while their mission is to stop all deportations, they want to utilize stories most likely to generate sympathy.

“But both the Soros groups and media are underestimating the level of American resolve to deport illegals especially after all of the violent protests and attacks we’ve seen from leftists in the last few months,” Gheen added. “These kinds of protests that involve blocking roads, violence, and the breaking of laws are having the opposite effect from what the demonstrators intend. Instead of generating sympathy, these kinds of arrestable offenses are building support for immigration and border law enforcement.”

Chris Farrell, director of research and investigation for the government watchdog Judicial Watch, said the pattern has been set that everything Trump attempts to do in fulfillment of his campaign promises will be protested, sometimes violently. And immigration policies will be at the top of the protesters’ list.

“As government returns to actually enforcing the country’s laws, there will be a marked increase by various activist groups to disrupt and engage in various activities to publicize or promote their agenda. It will be a steady diet from the media,” he said. “You’ll see nothing but very sad stories of how the people that are felons are actually the victims of America, and so I think they will conspicuously avoid the persons involved in violent crimes against Americans, the heroin dealers and the guys involved in the grand theft auto operations, and instead you’ll see the focus on tearful children.”

Farrell said these protests will be “orchestrated” by moneyed groups on the left.

“They didn’t spontaneously appear on the street, they had their signs, their megaphones and their T-shirts, so this is all orchestrated and is part of their organizational goals, and if people don’t pause to think about what they are watching, and stop to think well what about the victim and what consequences did she suffer, they will never know the other part of the story,” he said.