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Ukraine troops on high alert amid growing tension with Russia
(CNN)Ukraine is ordering its troops to be on the "highest level of combat readiness" Thursday, amid growing tensions with Russia over Crimea.
The order comes after Russia accused Ukraine on Wednesday of launching a militant attack at "critically important infrastructure" near the city of Armyansk, Crimea, according to Russia's state news service TASS.
But Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko refuted the claims, calling them "insane" and suggesting Russia's aim was more military threats against its neighbor.
The spat has seen tensions between the countries rise to their highest level since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.
Violent clashes on the streets of Ukraine between pro-European activists and pro-Russian supporters in early 2014 set the scene for the annexation.
By March of that year, thousands of Russian-speaking troops poured into Crimea. Weeks later, Russia completed its annexation of the peninsula in a referendum that was slammed by Ukraine as illegitimate....
http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/11/europe/ukraine-high-alert-russia-crimea/index.html
(CNN)Ukraine is ordering its troops to be on the "highest level of combat readiness" Thursday, amid growing tensions with Russia over Crimea.
The order comes after Russia accused Ukraine on Wednesday of launching a militant attack at "critically important infrastructure" near the city of Armyansk, Crimea, according to Russia's state news service TASS.
But Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko refuted the claims, calling them "insane" and suggesting Russia's aim was more military threats against its neighbor.
The spat has seen tensions between the countries rise to their highest level since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.
Violent clashes on the streets of Ukraine between pro-European activists and pro-Russian supporters in early 2014 set the scene for the annexation.
By March of that year, thousands of Russian-speaking troops poured into Crimea. Weeks later, Russia completed its annexation of the peninsula in a referendum that was slammed by Ukraine as illegitimate....
http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/11/europe/ukraine-high-alert-russia-crimea/index.html
Alleged Russian involvement in DNC hack gives U.S. a taste of Kremlin meddling
3 / 17
The Washington Post
Michael Birnbaum5 hrs ago
Police: Man attacks Swiss train passengers with fire, knife
© Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a government meeting in the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2016.BRUSSELS — The hacking of Democratic Party computer systems, widely believed by U.S. intelligence officials to be the work of the Russian government, may be giving Washington a new taste of unconventional Kremlin tactics that have long been employed to influence politics in neighboring European countries.
Russia has tried hard in recent years to tug Europe to its side, bankrolling the continent’s extremist political parties, working to fuel a backlash against migrants and using its vast energy resources as a cudgel against its neighbors. Two-and-a-half years into the Ukraine crisis, Obama administration officials say that the Kremlin may now be engaging in similar trickery in the U.S. presidential campaign in an effort to boost Russia-friendly Republican nominee Donald Trump.
The alleged effort would be an unusually blunt challenge to the U.S. political system, but one familiar to Europe, where officials and analysts see Russian fingerprints on a wide spectrum of initiatives designed to split Western unity and encourage acceptance of Kremlin policies. European leaders say Russia has been involved in such actions as an April referendum in the Netherlands that rejected a European Union trade deal with Ukraine and the strengthening of cross-border bonds among Euroskeptic parties.
With many U.S. and European voters feeling left adrift by the tides of globalization and threatened by migration, the Russian efforts have played on existing Western weaknesses and found a receptive audience.
“The Russians have been trying for years to destabilize Europe,” said Alexander Pechtold, a Dutch lawmaker who was a leader of the losing effort to persuade voters to support the Ukraine deal. The referendum was triggered by anti-E.U. activists who said they want to stop the expansion of the bloc and improve relations with Russia.
“Over a long period of time, Russia has been stoking unrest in Europe, an unrest that already exists because we find ourselves in a vulnerable period,” Pechtold said. “It uses that weakness to deteriorate the situation to its advantage.”
In Europe, Russia has been pressing hard to roll back sanctions imposed after it annexed Crimea in 2014, a task that could succeed with the support of just one of the 28 E.U. nations, which need unanimity to prolong the measures. Even before that conflict, Russian President Vladimir Putin was working to build support for his vision of the world, which seeks to preserve his domestic power by favoring authoritarian leaders over democratically elected ones and by gaining for his country the deference once accorded to the Soviet Union.
Of course, Russia did not create the British Euroskepticism that led voters to opt to pull out of the E.U. Nor did it set in motion the conflagration in Syria, whose refugees have taxed European unity in a way that little else has. But at each turn, the Kremlin has sought to exploit and exacerbate the vulnerabilities of the E.U. and the NATO military alliance, leaders and analysts say.
“They try to benefit the most out of these messes, but I wouldn’t say they are creating them,” said Peter Kreko, director of the Political Capital Institute, a Budapest-based think tank that has studied links between European political parties and the Kremlin. He said he had found deepening ties not just to parties on the extreme left and right, but also to mainstream groups such as the center-right Republicans in France, where both houses of Parliament voted this spring in favor of rolling back sanctions against Russia.
Ultimately, many of the Russian efforts have been unsuccessful. E.U. nations extended sanctions in June, for example. But the multi-pronged strategy has nevertheless given Russia an outsize global role at a time when its economy is stagnant and its long-term prospects look weak.
“It’s a tool for Russia to maintain its influence when it’s much more difficult to do it via ordinary economic tools,” Kreko said.
The efforts to pull Europe toward Russia go far beyond courting individual political parties, officials and analysts say, although those tools remain important. In Eastern Europe, leaders suspect the Kremlin of funding environmental groups that oppose measures that would make their countries less dependent on Russian energy. Across Europe, Kremlin-backed media outlets Russia Today and Sputnik News have made aggressive expansions into local-language European media markets in the past two years, pushing an aggressively pro-Russian line that sometimes has only a loose relationship to the truth.
In January, for example, Russia’s state-run First Channel reported that a 13-year-old Russian-German girl had been gang-raped by migrants in Berlin.German police found that the allegations were false, but the story — amplified by the German-language arm of Kremlin-run Sputnik News — sparked large protests by Germany’s Russian community, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused Germany of a coverup.
“The strength of Russia’s push, of its political engagement, its approach to the E.U., is that it doesn’t rely too heavily on a single instrument or a single tool to achieve its goals. Instead what it does is use different approaches at different times in different countries,” said Andrew Foxall, the director of the Russia Studies Center at the Henry Jackson Society, a London-based think tank.
That propensity to cause mischief in other nations’ political systems may be behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s computer systems, officials say. The hack caused an embarrassment for the party when leaked emails showed the party’s chairwoman, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.), and others favoring Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the primaries. Wasserman Schultz stepped down after the leak last month. Officials say it remains unclear whether the hacking was performed as part of routine foreign espionage or whether the DNC was specifically targeted to sway the election.
...
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...ste-of-kremlin-meddling/ar-BBvB23h?li=BBnbfcL
3 / 17
The Washington Post
Michael Birnbaum5 hrs ago
Police: Man attacks Swiss train passengers with fire, knife
Russia has tried hard in recent years to tug Europe to its side, bankrolling the continent’s extremist political parties, working to fuel a backlash against migrants and using its vast energy resources as a cudgel against its neighbors. Two-and-a-half years into the Ukraine crisis, Obama administration officials say that the Kremlin may now be engaging in similar trickery in the U.S. presidential campaign in an effort to boost Russia-friendly Republican nominee Donald Trump.
The alleged effort would be an unusually blunt challenge to the U.S. political system, but one familiar to Europe, where officials and analysts see Russian fingerprints on a wide spectrum of initiatives designed to split Western unity and encourage acceptance of Kremlin policies. European leaders say Russia has been involved in such actions as an April referendum in the Netherlands that rejected a European Union trade deal with Ukraine and the strengthening of cross-border bonds among Euroskeptic parties.
With many U.S. and European voters feeling left adrift by the tides of globalization and threatened by migration, the Russian efforts have played on existing Western weaknesses and found a receptive audience.
“The Russians have been trying for years to destabilize Europe,” said Alexander Pechtold, a Dutch lawmaker who was a leader of the losing effort to persuade voters to support the Ukraine deal. The referendum was triggered by anti-E.U. activists who said they want to stop the expansion of the bloc and improve relations with Russia.
“Over a long period of time, Russia has been stoking unrest in Europe, an unrest that already exists because we find ourselves in a vulnerable period,” Pechtold said. “It uses that weakness to deteriorate the situation to its advantage.”
In Europe, Russia has been pressing hard to roll back sanctions imposed after it annexed Crimea in 2014, a task that could succeed with the support of just one of the 28 E.U. nations, which need unanimity to prolong the measures. Even before that conflict, Russian President Vladimir Putin was working to build support for his vision of the world, which seeks to preserve his domestic power by favoring authoritarian leaders over democratically elected ones and by gaining for his country the deference once accorded to the Soviet Union.
Of course, Russia did not create the British Euroskepticism that led voters to opt to pull out of the E.U. Nor did it set in motion the conflagration in Syria, whose refugees have taxed European unity in a way that little else has. But at each turn, the Kremlin has sought to exploit and exacerbate the vulnerabilities of the E.U. and the NATO military alliance, leaders and analysts say.
“They try to benefit the most out of these messes, but I wouldn’t say they are creating them,” said Peter Kreko, director of the Political Capital Institute, a Budapest-based think tank that has studied links between European political parties and the Kremlin. He said he had found deepening ties not just to parties on the extreme left and right, but also to mainstream groups such as the center-right Republicans in France, where both houses of Parliament voted this spring in favor of rolling back sanctions against Russia.
Ultimately, many of the Russian efforts have been unsuccessful. E.U. nations extended sanctions in June, for example. But the multi-pronged strategy has nevertheless given Russia an outsize global role at a time when its economy is stagnant and its long-term prospects look weak.
“It’s a tool for Russia to maintain its influence when it’s much more difficult to do it via ordinary economic tools,” Kreko said.
The efforts to pull Europe toward Russia go far beyond courting individual political parties, officials and analysts say, although those tools remain important. In Eastern Europe, leaders suspect the Kremlin of funding environmental groups that oppose measures that would make their countries less dependent on Russian energy. Across Europe, Kremlin-backed media outlets Russia Today and Sputnik News have made aggressive expansions into local-language European media markets in the past two years, pushing an aggressively pro-Russian line that sometimes has only a loose relationship to the truth.
In January, for example, Russia’s state-run First Channel reported that a 13-year-old Russian-German girl had been gang-raped by migrants in Berlin.German police found that the allegations were false, but the story — amplified by the German-language arm of Kremlin-run Sputnik News — sparked large protests by Germany’s Russian community, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused Germany of a coverup.
“The strength of Russia’s push, of its political engagement, its approach to the E.U., is that it doesn’t rely too heavily on a single instrument or a single tool to achieve its goals. Instead what it does is use different approaches at different times in different countries,” said Andrew Foxall, the director of the Russia Studies Center at the Henry Jackson Society, a London-based think tank.
That propensity to cause mischief in other nations’ political systems may be behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s computer systems, officials say. The hack caused an embarrassment for the party when leaked emails showed the party’s chairwoman, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.), and others favoring Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the primaries. Wasserman Schultz stepped down after the leak last month. Officials say it remains unclear whether the hacking was performed as part of routine foreign espionage or whether the DNC was specifically targeted to sway the election.
...
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...ste-of-kremlin-meddling/ar-BBvB23h?li=BBnbfcL
I don't believe in accidents. Therefore, this is calculated on Russia's side for a reason.I believe Russia wants a cold war again. The reason is simple - fear and war are good for business. It also ties in with Russia wanting a republican US president - that it is good for the business of war.
People continually fall for the same tricks from despots throughout history.
Aerial close encounter between US, Syrian jets
(CNN)Two American F-22s on patrol over Hasakah, Syria, flew within a mile of two Syrian Su-24 fighter jets and "encouraged" them to leave Friday, a US defense official told CNN.
The close encounter comes only a day after two Syrian warplanes attacked the Kurds, a key US ally, forcing US special operations forces to be withdrawn from their position in northern Syria.
The American aircraft are part of the beefed-up US air combat patrols in the area that the Pentagon had announced following Thursday's attack.
The pilots of the F-22 Raptors tried to call the Syrian aircraft cockpit-to-cockpit but got no response, the US official added.
US defense officials had told CNN earlier that the military had pulled US special operations forces from their northern Syria position after the Syrian military began bombing nearby, attacking Kurdish positions in and around the city of Hasakah.
The official indicated it was a relatively small number of US forces that moved out of their locations. It was not immediately clear how many are left, if any, in northern Syria.
No US forces were wounded during the Syrian bombing, according to officials.
Another senior defense official told CNN, "If the Syrians try this again, they are at great risk of losing an aircraft."
The attack in the Hasakah area has deeply unsettled Pentagon officials. US special operations forces have been in the area for months conducting training and advisory missions with the Arab and Kurdish elements of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the major US ally in the region.
When the bombing began, coalition forces on the ground tried to call the Syrian aircraft on a common radio channel, but there was no response, according to Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis.
He declined to say which coalition forces tried to reach the Syrians. But US personnel quickly called the Russians on a previously established channel to try to determine who was firing. Davis said the Russians assured the US it was not them. The US at that point made it clear through the Russians that the US would "take whatever action is necessary" to defend US forces on the ground if the strikes continued...
http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/19/politics/syria-bombing-us-forces/index.html
People continually fall for the same tricks from despots throughout history.
Aerial close encounter between US, Syrian jets
(CNN)Two American F-22s on patrol over Hasakah, Syria, flew within a mile of two Syrian Su-24 fighter jets and "encouraged" them to leave Friday, a US defense official told CNN.
The close encounter comes only a day after two Syrian warplanes attacked the Kurds, a key US ally, forcing US special operations forces to be withdrawn from their position in northern Syria.
The American aircraft are part of the beefed-up US air combat patrols in the area that the Pentagon had announced following Thursday's attack.
The pilots of the F-22 Raptors tried to call the Syrian aircraft cockpit-to-cockpit but got no response, the US official added.
US defense officials had told CNN earlier that the military had pulled US special operations forces from their northern Syria position after the Syrian military began bombing nearby, attacking Kurdish positions in and around the city of Hasakah.
The official indicated it was a relatively small number of US forces that moved out of their locations. It was not immediately clear how many are left, if any, in northern Syria.
No US forces were wounded during the Syrian bombing, according to officials.
Another senior defense official told CNN, "If the Syrians try this again, they are at great risk of losing an aircraft."
The attack in the Hasakah area has deeply unsettled Pentagon officials. US special operations forces have been in the area for months conducting training and advisory missions with the Arab and Kurdish elements of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the major US ally in the region.
When the bombing began, coalition forces on the ground tried to call the Syrian aircraft on a common radio channel, but there was no response, according to Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis.
He declined to say which coalition forces tried to reach the Syrians. But US personnel quickly called the Russians on a previously established channel to try to determine who was firing. Davis said the Russians assured the US it was not them. The US at that point made it clear through the Russians that the US would "take whatever action is necessary" to defend US forces on the ground if the strikes continued...
http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/19/politics/syria-bombing-us-forces/index.html
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BAML: 2016 could be a great year for defense stocks, especially if a Republican wins
..."Defense outperformed the S&P 500 in seven of the last nine presidential-election years since 1980," the note said, "with an average return of 17.2% versus 4.3% for the S&P 500."
The reason is the nature of how the companies make money. "Defense firms rely so heavily on contracts and funding from the federal government, so their earnings and performance are more closely tied to political changes rather than market forces," the note said.
During the most recent presidential-election year, 2012, the stocks of the defense companies tracked by BAML — Raytheon, L-3 Communications, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Huntington Ingalls, and General Dynamics — grew an average 19.1%, compared with 13.4% for the S&P 500.
In some presidential years the difference can be massive. In 2000, defense stocks beat the S&P by 44.7%, and in four presidential years tracked by BAML — 1980, 1992, 2000, and 2008 — the difference was at least 10%.
Additionally, even midterm years are good for defense companies. "Defense outperformed the S&P 500 in 12 of the last 18 election years since 1980, with an average return of 12.6% versus 5.6% for the S&P 500," BAML said...."
http://www.businessinsider.com/baml-election-years-good-for-defense-stocks-2015-7
Republicans claim they like small government and at every turn cry about the deficit. In fact, one of the hugest by a mile part of the government is Defense spending, of which the Republicans are a huge fan of.
Defense Firms Expect Increased Spending from Republicans as Republicans Decry Increased Spending
Lee Fang
Feb. 27 2015, 1:11 p.m.
Despite campaign rhetoric promising a smaller government, defense contractors are confident that the new Republican congressional majority will boost spending on their industry.
“Friends, this experiment with big government has lasted long enough,” Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader, said on election night last November, echoing a common theme among GOP candidates. McConnell’s party won control of the U.S. Senate and increased its ranks in the House of Representatives in the midterm elections.
For voters promised a leaner federal budget, certain areas, such as food stamps, are already in the crosshairs of legislators. But for the nation’s cyberspying companies and military contractors, “some measure of relief,” is on the way...
https://theintercept.com/2015/02/27...ent-from-republicans-who-hate-big-government/
Defense Firms Expect Increased Spending from Republicans as Republicans Decry Increased Spending
Lee Fang
Feb. 27 2015, 1:11 p.m.
Despite campaign rhetoric promising a smaller government, defense contractors are confident that the new Republican congressional majority will boost spending on their industry.
“Friends, this experiment with big government has lasted long enough,” Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader, said on election night last November, echoing a common theme among GOP candidates. McConnell’s party won control of the U.S. Senate and increased its ranks in the House of Representatives in the midterm elections.
For voters promised a leaner federal budget, certain areas, such as food stamps, are already in the crosshairs of legislators. But for the nation’s cyberspying companies and military contractors, “some measure of relief,” is on the way...
https://theintercept.com/2015/02/27...ent-from-republicans-who-hate-big-government/
The captain of the navy's stealthiest destroyer is named Captain James T. Kirk! 
Why not name the ship "The Enterprise"
http://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/to...to-join-us-navy/ar-AAiAp9t?li=BBnbfcL#image=2
Why not name the ship "The Enterprise"
http://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/to...to-join-us-navy/ar-AAiAp9t?li=BBnbfcL#image=2