Russia has begun works in the Syrian port of Tartus seeking to built a full-scale naval base for the ships of the Black Sea Fleet, currently based in Ukraine’s Sevastopol, the Kommersant newspaper reported on Friday, quoting unnamed sources in the Defense Ministry and the General Staff of the Russian Navy.

The paper noted that this is the first time Russia is setting up a military base outside the CIS since the fall of the USSR and that the base will allow Moscow to pursue its own line in the Middle East.
mosnews.com

You never can be too early when it comes to an anniversary. It’s barely June, but a quick look down the road reminds us that the twentieth anniversary of the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra Affair lies just ahead this November. As Greg Grandin reminds us, Irangate (as it came to be known in the wake of Nixon’s Watergate fiasco) was a kind of coming attractions, right down to its cast of characters, for our own era of right-wing domination, carnage, and now — finally — full-blown corruption scandals. From Vice President Cheney to the new Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, so many of the Iran-Contra era scoundrels returned to the political stage these last years for a grim second bow and, perhaps not so strangely, similar results — though this time not on the relatively parochial stage of Central America, but in the oil heartlands of our planet.
tomdispatch.com

It may be a new month, but it’s the same old Wall Street Journal trumpeting the latest US gambit designed to hide its real intentions toward Iran. Again it was in a front page feature story on June 1 headlined: “In Shift, U.S. Offers to Talk to Iran, Aiming to Bolster Allies’ Cohesion.” The WSJ is never up to explaining the real motive behind the latest ploy and instead falsely claims it’s “a nod to European allies’ desire to offer carrots as well as sticks to steer Iran away from its efforts to produce weapons-grade uranium.” So to achieve that supposed end, the US has now said it will join with the European-led “negotiations” currently ongoing and actually talk to the Iranians. One has to be impressed with such professed generosity, which, in fact, is just more barely disguised US audacity with a heavy dose of mendacity.
uruknet.info

Bolton: ‘This is Put Up or Shut Up Time For Iran,’ Unilateral Military Action Is ‘On The Table’

Rice’s Iranian Ruse

As explained in a new book, Mission Rejected, the sight of U.S. troops kicking the heads of decapitated Iraqis around ‘like a soccer ball’ made Army soldier Joshua Key desert to Canada.
alertnet.org

May 31 (Bloomberg) — Bolivian President Evo Morales said the U.S. organized teams to track down and kill him, according to a note published on the Bolivian presidential Web site.

Morales, speaking at the opening of a hospital that was built with help from Cuba in the town of Escoma, Bolivia, said he recently found out about the plots against him, the state newswire ABI said in the report on the presidential Web site.
bloomberg.com

Have Bolivia, Ecuador set themselves up for a fall?
CARACAS, Venezuela In recent weeks, both Bolivian President Evo Morales and Ecuador’s president, Alfredo Palacio, have taken a page out of Venezuelan populist President Hugo Chavez’s natural resources manual.

It’s the page that features politicizing the oil and gas industries and nationalizing them, keeping more of the petrodollars at home but alienating longtime foreign investors.

With new, smaller profit margins for outside companies, foreign investors are now slowing the rate of investment in the jointly run oil and gas fields.

“The outlook for increases in the future is starting to go up in smoke, and we see a petroleum industry in contraction,” said Luis Giusti, the former president of Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), in an interview earlier this month with Venezuela’s Union Radio. “The day the prices change, the situation is going to be evident once and for all,” he said.

…They say you can tell a lot about a society by how it treats its weakest and most vulnerable members. I think that is true. You can tell a lot about the United States by just listening to the debate on immigration. You can tell a lot about previous Venezuelan governments by how they allowed millions to languish in the shadows. And you can tell a lot about Chavez by how he has brought those millions out from the shadows and allowed them to assume their rightful place as full Venezuelan citizens.
axisoflogic.com

…What have we learned? That all the big countries of Latin America are “spending billions on defense.” But I guess a headline like, “Venezuela spending half as much as its neighbors on defense” just doesn’t advance the preferred storyline.
alertnet.org

Iran and Venezuela will build an oil refinery at the ‘Faga’ region in the oil-reach Orinoko province in Venezuela, local new sources said Wednesday.

The refinery will be designed to refine heavy oil and produce gasoline and other oil derivatives.

Head of Venezuela’s Petroleos company said the agreement could be beneficial to both countries.

He added the heavy oil in the region could easily be refined at which time Iran will import gasoline from Venezuela.
irna.ir

Professor Rachel Giora of the University of Tel Aviv backs boycott on her colleagues with different views; ‘I support every form of open criticism against the current policies of the Israeli government,’ she says.
ynet.com

The Lobby; But Which One?
…If there is to be any systematic examination of the concept of “The Israel Lobby” — or what is more widely named as “The Jewish Lobby” — more than a particular selection of facts must be examined to arrive at a general conclusion. Since the motivation behind current U.S. State Department Near East policy is a crucial aspect of the question of what the problem is, it is first of all necessary to examine what is being examined. If the U.S.A.’s Jewish population of 2% is to be viewed alone and out of context then one may simply proceed to describe the Zionist Lobby as the dominant political voice in that nationality. One may even say its various factions have a dictatorial position in that community’s organizations. This monopoly has come about as a result of the Nazi extermination of the greater part of the Jewish Left in Europe (the non-Zionist movements such as the Jewish Bund) while at the same time the leaderships of the Jewish revolutionary tendencies were eliminated by the Stalinist regime know by the name of Communism, during the years 1926 until 1956.

If, on the other hand one examines the general context of USA political society, it is possible to focus on more than one particular Lobby that identifies with the Zionist State of Israel, since there are a number of others as well. Consequently the question becomes; which Lobby has the greater influence and in whose interests does it operate?

Many Israeli settlers would leave peacefully: poll
JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Forty-four percent of Jewish settlers would be ready to leave their homes in the occupied West Bank without resistance if Israel decided to remove them, a poll published on Wednesday by an Israeli newspaper showed.

The percentage of settlers said they would evacuate was up from 25 percent last June, the poll conducted by the Geocartografia Institute showed.

The survey in the Maariv daily said a representative sample of the 240,000 settlers had been asked whether they would agree to leave under an Israeli “realignment” plan which calls for removal of some isolated settlements while strengthening others.

…The military began a criminal investigation into the Nov. 19 deaths of 24 Iraqis in the town of Haditha, west of Baghdad, following a March 27 report by Time Magazine that Marines killed unarmed Iraqis.

“There are three or four at least at this time,” Caldwell told reporters in Baghdad in response to a question about how many other such incidents were under investigation. Caldwell didn’t have any details of those probes, and didn’t know their status, beyond that they’re in “the first stages,” he told a news conference carried live on the Pentagon Web site.
bloomberg.com

BBC video:Iraq War Vets talk about random civilian killings
Newsnight follow a group of former US soldiers who have returned from Iraq deeply affected by the experience. As they march across America to protest, shocking interviews emerge on the indiscriminate killing of Iraqi civilians.

Veterans reveal they had been trained to see Iraqis as animals, shoot up the landscape and kill anything that moved. Shovels and guns were carried by patrols in order to give the false impression that innocent killed civilians were actually up to no good – supposedly killed whilst digging holes for IED’s.