War

If China begins to reclaim and militarize Scarborough Shoal, says Philippines President Benigno S. Aquino III, America must fight. Should we back down, says Aquino, the United States will lose “its moral ascendancy, and also the confidence of one of its allies.”

And what is Scarborough Shoal? A cluster of rocks and reefs, 123 miles west of Subic Bay, that sits astride the passageway out of the South China Sea into the Pacific, and is well within Manila’s 200-mile exclusive economic zone.

Top Israeli General Speaks Out Against Israel’s Crimes Against Palestinians

General Golan, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army, on Holocaust Memorial Day, said:

“If there is something that frightens me about the memories of the Holocaust, it is the knowledge of the awful processes which happened in Europe in general, and in Germany in particular, 70, 80, 90 years ago, and finding traces of them here in our midst, today, in 2016.”

Saudi Arabia have issued a scathing attack on the U.S. government, accusing them of orchestrating the 9/11 attacks in order to justify an on-going “war on terror” in the Middle East.  The Saudi press have hit back at the U.S. Senate’s vote approving a bill that allows the families of 9/11 victims to sue the Saudi regime for their deaths. Al-Hayat daily newspaper published an article this week saying that the U.S. government planned the attacks on the World Trade Center in order to create a fake war on terror.

Baltimore police officer Edward Nero was acquitted on moments ago of all charges in the 2015 death of black detainee Freddie Gray, an incident that triggered rioting and protests and fueled the Black Lives Matter movement.

According to Reuters, Judge Barry Williams, who heard the case in a bench trial, handed down the verdict in Baltimore City Circuit Court. Nero, 30, had faced misdemeanor charges of second-degree assault, reckless endangerment and two counts of misconduct in office. Nero was the second officer to be tried in Gray's April 2015 death.

NATO have deployed its largest military presence to the Russian border since 1941, according to Professor Stephen F. Cohen – a U.S. scholar of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University.  “We have been watching for nearly a month a steady buildup of American and NATO forces along near Russia’s borders – on land, on sea and in the air,” he remarked on The John Batchelor Show.