Russia expels American diplomats and intelligence operatives

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by Scott Humor

In the last days of 2016, one couldn’t do enough to avoid announcements of 35 Russian diplomats being expelled from the US and Russian government-owned property being seized.

Every five minutes on every channel, there was footage of people burdened with children and suitcases waiting on wet tarmac for a plane to pick them up, because they weren’t allowed to remain inside the airport building.

Also, there was the same, it seemed, footage of a modest red three-story turn of the century waterfront house with a simple garden bench near water, that was inevitably referred to by every US and EU channels as a “Russian secret services center” despite the notable absence of any satellite antennas so prevalent around the American Embassies all over the world, in Ukraine, for example, or in Venezuela.

Don’t Cry For Me Venezuela

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by Jimmie Moglia

According to the great Dr. Johnson, “Men can be estimated by those who know them not, only as they are represented by those who know them.” An unavoidable universal contingency – for, indeed, we don’t know most of the people we judge. And the same, but for a few much-travelled individuals, applies to nations.

We also know that “on the tongue of Rumor, continual slanders rise, stuffing the ears of men with false reports.”

First time in History: Bitcoin Value Skyrockets to New Record-Breaking $1,700

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Accordin to BuyBtcoInNigeria For the first time in history, bitcoin has topped $1,700 in value. This is a 85-percent gain in the cryptocurrency in 2017, and a 43-percent gain in value in only one month.

Since May 2016, market capitalization on bitcoin has nearly quadrupled, from $7.16 billion in May 2016 to $27.9 billion today.

Major drivers of the trend were Japan allowing bitcoin to become legal tender in the Land of the Rising Sun (albeit with lots of oversight), and Russia's announcement that they'd rule on cryptocurrency legality in 2018.

Sacred Communities and The Emergent Multipolar Landscape

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By Blake Archer Williams

(Blake Archer Williams’ two books, Introduction to Walīyic Islam and Creedal Foundations of Walīyic Islam, which are the sources for the ideas presented in this essay – and where they are fully elaborated – can be found on Amazon.com, together with all 32 of his books on Walīyic Islam or the Shi’a Islam of Imam Khomeini which is the basis of the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran.)

Serbia’s Post-Electoral Protest Was A Charade

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by Stephen Karganovic

Just as a week ago we speculated might happen, Serbia’s mass anti-regime protests, which started as if on cue the day after the apparently “not so free and unfettered” April 2 Presidential election, have now abated significantly, but without any obvious public reason.^[1] None of the protesters’ objections (many of them legitimate and sensible) were seriously entertained by the authorities. If we take the Easter weekend as the watershed separating daily mass protests involving tens of thousands in twenty cities and towns across Serbia from post-holiday crowds, shrunken to barely one or two hundred, one must wonder: what changed over that weekend? Did thousands of former dissidents suddenly get religion, decide to turn the other cheek to the regime, and stay at home? Or was there from the beginning of these “spontaneous” protests more to it than met the eye?