Politics

Turkish border forces have shot dead refugees as they tried to escape the Syrian conflict, according to reports. A UK-based monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has claimed that 16 people seeking sanctuary in Turkey have been shot over the past four months. The Mail Online reports: The true number is believed to be higher, according to a Syrian police officer and a Syrian smuggler who lives in Turkey, but it is impossible to say exactly how many because the bodies of those who fell on the Syrian side of the border were dragged back to be buried in the war zone.

Submitted by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

The Wisconsin primary could be an axle-breaking speed bump on Donald Trump’s road to the nomination.

Ted Cruz, now the last hope to derail Trump of a desperate Beltway elite that lately loathed him, has taken the lead in the Badger State.

Millions in attack ads are being dumped on the Donald’s head by super PACs of GOP candidates, past and present. Gov. Scott Walker has endorsed Cruz. Conservative talk radio is piling on Trump.

We are one step closer to another full-blown return of the cold war.

Yesterday, during a briefing in Latvia's capital Riga, NATO Gen. Philip Breedlove said that NATO and the United States are switching their defense doctrine from assurance to deterrence in Eastern Europe in response to a “resurgent and aggressive Russia."

The comments by Breedlove come a day after the Pentagon said it would begin continuous rotations of an additional armored brigade of about 4,200 troops in Eastern Europe beginning in early 2017.

Iran is planning an ambitious initiative to connect the Caspian Sea to central regions of the country and the Persian Gulf, via an artificial channel link Sputnik news reports: The project, which is expected to be completed in the 2020s, is particularly interesting for Russia due to the cold spell with Turkey, but European and post-Soviet states will also benefit from it. In Iran, “work is underway to construct a navigable channel linking the Caspian and the Persian Gulf,” economic analyst Alexei Chickin observed. The initiative itself is not new.

Submitted by Clarice Palmer via TheAntiMedia.org,

As online publications have hailed the major protests overtaking the streets of Brazil at the outset of an apparent political revolution, few discuss the problems that have been brewing for decades in South America’s largest nation.