Ukraine: Russia threatened with new sanctions, Poroshenko warns of ‘point of no return’

The EU is threatening to impose fresh sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine crisis. Officials are set to draw up proposals within a week.

It is not clear when they would be imposed, but Angela Merkel has said that new sanctions would be brought in if there is no change in Ukraine – or if the situation deteriorates further. 

“The European Council said that it stands ready to take further significant steps in the light of the evolution of the situation on the ground,” Herman Van Rompuy, European Council President, told reporters in Brussels. 

“And it requests the Commission to urgently undertake preparatory work and present proposals for consideration within a week.”

Also in Brussels, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko warned that the crisis in his country is almost at the stage of a full blown war.

“I think we are very close to the point of no return,” he stressed.

“The point of no return is full scale war, which already happened in the territory controlled by separatists and there – instead of separatists – there are regular Russian troops.”

Moscow has denied there are any Russian troops on the ground in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Slovakia says EU sanctions are “meaningless” and is threatening to veto additional measures against Russia.

Source: Liveleak

Tusk and Mogherini land EU Council Presidency and Foreign Affairs

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk will be the next President of the European Council. He takes over from Herman van Rompuy, who made the announcement at a news conference in Brussels. 

Tusk, who does not speak French or English very well, said he will be brushing up on his language skills.

“Nothing is good enough for Europe, including my English today – but, i will polish my English. and as i mentioned, I will be ready in December, 100 percent, don’t worry“said Tusk.

Italian Foreign Minister Federica Mogherini will replace Baroness Cathy Ashton as the EU’s High Representative of Foreign Affairs. 

Speaking about the Russia-Ukraine crisis, Mogherini said: “We all know that the military way is not the solution to the crisis, for the benefit of the Ukrainians first. And so, as we think and we work on the level of sanctions, we also have to keep the diplomatic way open – and that’s our job, to do both.”

Tusk beat his more high profile rival, Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, who had at one time been the favourite.

From the European Council in Brussels, euronews correspondent Margherita Sforza explained the picks for the two top jobs: “By choosing Mogherini and Tusk, European leaders have pulled together the diplomacy of southern and eastern Europe, expectations of the new generation and political experience. It’s a strong signal at a time when Europe is dealing with the instability in Ukraine and the violence in the Middle East.”

Source: Liveleak

UN peacekeepers’ “greatest escape” from Syrian rebels as they sleep

It’s been revealed that 40 UN peacekeepers made a daring escape under the cover of night after being held siege by Syrian Islamist militants for two days.

The Filipino troops, who are based in the Golan Heights UN buffer zone, had been engaged in a seven hour gun battle on Saturday from around 100 militants after they refused to surrender with their weapons.

Then, while the rebels were sleeping, the 40 men fled from the UN encampment, travelling across the hills for nearly two hours, before meeting up with other UN forces who took them to safety.

General Gregorio Pio Catapang, Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines said: “Currently, Filipino peacekeepers from both positions 68 and 69 have been successfully repositioned to Camp Ziouani. The Armed Forces of the Philippines and the United Nations will not compromise the safety and security of our troops while in the pursuit of their duties.”

Capatang added “we may call it the greatest escape.” 

A UN official said they were helped by Israeli and Syrian governments, with Syrian government forces firing at the rebels to weaken their positions.

On Saturday, 32 other Filipino peacekeepers had been rescued from a different base with the help of Irish UN troops. Forty-four Fijian soldiers still remain in the hands of the insurgents.

Source:Liveleak

Netanyahu threatens reoccupation of Gaza Strip

The Israeli prime minister says he cannot rule out the reoccupation of the Gaza Strip, while the Palestinian resistance group Hamas describes any attempts to disarm Palestinian fighters as worthless.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s Saturday threat of further aggression came less than a week after the Israeli regime’s 50-day onslaught on the besieged Palestinian enclave finally came to a halt following a long-term cease-fire agreement.

Netanyahu defended Tel Aviv’s devastating war on Gaza, adding that toppling Hamas still tops the regime’s agenda.

He said that Palestinians should choose between Hamas and peace with Tel Aviv.

The Israeli officials are pushing for the disarmament of the Palestinian resistance groups, including Hamas, but the spokesman for the group has totally dismissed the idea.

Sami Abu Zuhri insisted that it is the Israeli regime which should be disarmed for killing children and women.

More than 2,200 Palestinians, nearly 500 of them children, lost their lives during the recent Israeli offensive.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu, in a bid to downplay the role of the resistance of the Palestinians in forcing Israel to agree to a cease-fire, claimed that the reason for the regime’s decision to end the Gaza strikes was to concentrate on other regional issues.

"We fought for 50 days and we could have fought for 500 days, but we are in a situation where the Islamic State (ISIL) is at the gates of Jordan, Al-Qaeda is in the Golan and Hezbollah is at the border with Lebanon," Netanyahu said.

"We decided not to get bogged down in Gaza, and we could have, but we decided to limit our objective and restore calm to Israeli citizens," Netanyahu added.


http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/al-qaeda-and-isis-are-israels-new-northern-neighbors/2014/08/29/

A Two-Faced Friendship: Turkey Is 'Partner and Target' for the NSA

Documents from the archive of whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal wide-scale spying against Turkey by America's NSA and Britain's GCHQ. They also show the US worked closely with Ankara to battle Kurdish separatists.
On a December night in 2011, a terrible thing happened on Mount Cudi, near the Turkish-Iraqi border. One side described it as a massacre; the other called it an accident.

Several Turkish F-16 fighter jets bombed a caravan of villagers that night, apparently under the belief that they were guerilla fighters with the separatist Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK). The group was returning from northern Iraq and their mules were loaded down with fuel canisters and other cargo. They turned out to be smugglers, not PKK fighters. Some 34 people died in the attack.An American Predator drone flying overhead had detected the group, prompting US analysts to alert their Turkish partners.

The reconnaissance flight -- which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal in 2012 -- and its tragic consequences provided an important insight into the very tight working relationship between American and Turkish intelligence services in the fight against Kurdish separatists. Although the PKK is still considered a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union, its image has been improved radically by its recent success in fighting the Islamic State (IS) in northern Iraq and Syria. PKK fighters, backed by US airstrikes, are on the front lines against the jihadist movement there, and some in the West are now advocating arming the group and lifting its terrorist label.

Documents from the archive of US whistleblower Edward Snowden that SPIEGEL and The Intercept have seen show just how deeply involved America has become in Turkey's fight against the Kurds. For a time, the NSA even delivered its Turkish partners with the mobile phone location data of PKK leaders on an hourly basis. The US government also provided the Turks with information about PKK money flows and the whereabouts of some of its leaders living in exile abroad.

A Leading Target for Spying

At the same time, the Snowden documents also show that Turkey is one of the United States' leading targets for spying. Documents show that the political leadership in Washington, DC, has tasked the NSA with divining Turkey's "leadership intention," as well as monitoring its operations in 18 other key areas. This means that Germany's foreign intelligence service, which drew criticism in recent weeks after it was revealed it had been spying on Turkey, isn't the only secret service interested in keeping tabs on the government in Ankara.

Turkey's strategic location at the junction of Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Middle East made the NATO member state an important partner to Western intelligence agencies going back to the very beginning of the Cold War. The Snowden documents show that Turkey is the NSA's oldest partner in Asia. Even before the NSA's founding in 1952, the CIA had established a "Sigint," or signals intelligence, partnership with Turkey dating back to the 1940s.

During the Cold War, the US used bases in Turkey primarily to conduct surveillance against the "underbelly of the Soviet beast," as one NSA document puts it. Today, it targets Russia and Georgia from Turkish soil, collecting information in "near real time." Since the outbreak of its civil war, Turkey's neighbor Syria has become a central focus of NSA surveillance.

US secret agents have also provided support to the Turkish government in its battle against the Kurdish separatists with the PKK for years. One top-secret NSA document from January 2007, for example, states that the agency provided Turkey with geographic data and recordings of telephone conversations of PKK members that appear to have helped Turkish agents capture or kill the targets. "Geolocations data and voice cuts from Kurdistan Worker Party (PKK) communications which were passed to Turkey by NSA yielded actionable intelligence that led to the demise or capture of dozens of PKK members in the past year," the document says.

The NSA has also infiltrated the Internet communications of PKK leaders living in Europe. Turkish intelligence helped pave the way to the success by providing the email addresses used by the targets.

The exchange of data went so far that the NSA even gave Turkey the location of the mobile phones of certain PKK leaders inside Turkey, providing updated information every six hours. During one military operation in Turkey in October 2005, the NSA delivered the location data every hour.

In May 2007, the director of national intelligence at the time signed a "memorandum" pledging deeper intelligence support for Turkey. A report prepared on the occasion of an April 2013 visit by a Turkish delegation to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade indicates that cooperation in targeting the PKK "has increased across the board" since the signing of the memorandum. That partnership has focused overwhelmingly on the PKK -- NSA assets in Turkey collected more data on PKK last year than any other target except for Russia.

It resulted in the creation of a joint working group called the Combined Intelligence Fusion Cell, a team of American and Turkish specialists working together on projects that included finding targets for possible Turkish airstrikes against suspected PKK members. All the data for one entire wave of attacks carried out in December 2007 originated from this intelligence cell, a diplomatic cable from the WikiLeaks archive states.

Support Continues Under Obama

The deep working relationship has continued under Barack Obama's presidency. In January 2012, US officials proposed supporting Turkey in their fight against the PKK with diverse measures, including access to a state-of-the-art speech recognition system that enabled real-time analysis of intercepted conversations. The system can even search for keywords and identify the person speaking if a voice sample of that individual has been stored.

The NSA offered to install two such systems for Turkey's intelligence service. In exchange, the Turks would provide voice samples for a number of Kurdish activists. Given its close and enduring relationship with the NSA, agency authorities wrote that they saw little risk in providing the technology. The only thing NSA experts didn't feel comfortable entrusting to Turkey was the automatic keyword search function.

The partnership is managed through the NSA's Special Liaison Activity Turkey (SUSLAT) office, which is based in Ankara. In addition to data, the Americans provide their Turkish partners with complete interception systems, decryption assistance and training.

Using its internal "Follow the money" reconnaissance unit, the NSA also tracks PKK's cash flows in Europe. The Turks reciprocate by providing the US agents with written transcripts of telephone calls made by PKK leaders as well as intelligence insights about Russia and Ukraine.

At the same time, however, Turkey is itself the target of intense surveillance even as it cooperates closely with the US. One NSA document describes the country bluntly as both a "partner and target." The very politicians, military officials and intelligence agency officials with whom US officials work closely when conducting actions against the PKK are also considered legitimate spying targets by the NSA. To that end, in addition to the official SUSLAT liaison office and the intelligence workers it has cleared with the Turkish authorities, the US has two secret branch offices, operating Special Collection Service listening stations in both Istanbul and the capital city of Ankara.

The degree to which the NSA surveils its partner is made clear in the National Intelligence Priorities Framework (NIPF), a document establishing US intelligence priorities. Updated and presented to the president every six months, the NIPF shows a country's "standing" from the perspective of the US. In the April 2013 edition, Turkey is listed as one of the countries most frequently targeted by Washington for surveillance, with US intelligence services tasked with collecting data in 19 different areas of interest.

Surveilling Turkish Political Leaders

The document places Turkey at the level of Venezuela -- and even ahead of Cuba -- in terms of US interest in intelligence collection. Information about the "leadership intention" of the Turkish government is given the second-highest priority rating, and information about the military and its infrastructure, foreign policy goals, and energy security are given the third-highest priority rating. The same framework also lists the PKK as an intelligence target, but it is given a much lower priority ranking.

Beginning in 2006, the NSA began a broad surveillance operation -- a joint effort by several NSA units -- aimed at infiltrating the computers of Turkey's top political leaders. Internally, officials called the effort the "Turkish Surge Project Plan." It took six months for the team to achieve its goal. One document celebrates the discovery of the "winning combination" and reports that collection had begun: "They achieved their first-ever computer network exploitation success against Turkish leadership!"

It goes without saying that the US intelligence services also had Turkish diplomats in their sights, particularly those stationed in the United States. A classified document from 2010 states that the NSA surveilled the Turkish Embassy in Washington under a program codenamed "Powder." A similar project for monitoring Turkey's representation to the United Nations carried the name "Blackhawk."

Analysts had access to the telephone system in the Turkish Embassy and could tap content directly from computers. In addition, they infected computer systems used by the diplomats with spyware. The NSA also installed Trojan software at Turkey's UN representation in New York. According to the NSA document, it even has the capability of copying entire hard drives at the UN mission.

The NSA shared many of its spies' insights with its "Five Eyes" partners -- the British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand intelligence services. Within that group, the British had already developed their own access to Turkey, with its GCHQ spy agency monitoring political targets in Turkey as well as elements in the energy sector.

Targeting Turkey's Energy Minister

One classified British document states that in October 2008, GCHQ tasked agents with improving access to the Turkish Energy Ministry (MENR) as well as enterprises including the Petroleum Pipeline Corporation (BOTAS), the Turkish Petroleum Corporation (TPAO) and the energy company Calik Enerji. The assignment also included a list of the names of 13 targets, including then Turkish Energy Minister Hilmi Güler.

In 2008, GCHQ analysts began reviewing satellite images of the rooftops of ministries and companies to assess what types of communications systems they were using and the possibilities for infiltrating them. The documents do not indicate whether those efforts bore fruit.Turkish Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek is also explicitly named as a GCHQ "target," despite the fact that he is a dual Turkish-British citizen. Nevertheless, a surveillance order against him includes, among other things, two mobile phone numbers as well as his private Gmail address. When questioned by SPIEGEL reporters, GCHQ officials said they do not comment on the details of operations.

When The Guardian newspaper ran a short story last summer about a planned spying operation against the Turkish finance minister on the occasion of his visit to London in the run-up to the G-20 summit in 2009, officials in Ankara were so angered that the Foreign Ministry summoned the British ambassador and criticized the "scandalous" and "unacceptable" operation. Contacted for a response to the surveillance operations conducted by the NSA and GCHQ, a spokesman for the Turkish Foreign Ministry said "such things" would only be discussed at the diplomatic level.

Source: Liveleak

Poroshenko's army defeated by Donetsk Republic, blames it on Russia: Expert

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko warns his country is very close to the point of no return in its conflict with Russia.

Poroshenko, however, said enormous efforts are being made to prevent a full-scale war with Russia. He made the comments at a news conference in Brussels following a meeting with EU leaders. Earlier, he acknowledged that the European Union is gearing up a fresh wave of sanctions against Russia. Poroshenko said the new measures would be conditional on the success of a peace plan proposed by him. The European leaders met in the Belgian capital on Saturday to draw up new measures to force Moscow reconsider its position. The 28-nation bloc has already warned that the escalating conflict in Ukraine is putting all of Europe at the risk of war.

Source:Liveleak

UN peacekeepers in Golan Heights under fire from Syrian rebels

UN peacekeepers in the Golan Heights have been attacked by Syrian rebels.

On Thursday, the militants who are fighting the Syrian government crossed over into the UN buffer zone between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights taking 44 Fijian peacekeepers hostage.

They then surrounded two other UN encampments manned by 75 Filipino troops demanding they hand over their weapons. The Filipino troops at one base managed to get out but those at the other base came under attack on Saturday morning.

The UN has not confirmed which Syrian rebels are involved. However on Wednesday rebels including the Al-Qaeda affiliated Al-Nusra Front had seized control of the Al Qunaytirah border crossing from the Syrian government.

The UN has monitored the demilitarised buffer zone since 1974. Israel seized Golan Heights from Syria in 1967 and both countries are still technically in a state of war.

Source: Liveleak.