Escalations in a New Cold War. US-NATO Military Deployments on Russia’s Borders (Source consortiumnews.com) The Obama administration poked Russia in the eye again by activating a missile defense site in Romania while building up NATO forces on Russia’s borders, acts that could escalate toward nuclear war, notes Jonathan Marshall. If the United States ever ends up stumbling into a major conventional or nuclear war with Russia, the culprit will likely be two military boondoggles that refused to die when their primary mission ended with the demise of the Soviet Union: NATO and the U.S. anti-ballistic missile (ABM) program. The “military-industrial complex” that reaps hundreds of billions of dollars annually from support of those programs got a major boost this week when NATO  HYPERLINK “http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36272686” established its first major missile defense site at an air base in Romania, with plans to build a second installation in Poland by 2018. Although NATO and Pentagon spokesmen claim the ABM network in Eastern Europe is aimed at Iran, Russia isn’t persuaded for a minute. “This is not a defense system,” Nato-shield-russia-said Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday. “This is part of U.S. nuclear strategic potential brought [to] . . . Eastern Europe. . . Now, as these elements of ballistic missile defense are deployed, we are forced to think how to neutralize emerging threats to the Russian Federation.”

Here’s why Russia’s humongous new missile is worth worrying about (Source businessinsider.com)

Russia is testing an intercontinental ballistic missile that is so large and powerful it could hit any strategic target in the United States or NATO with independently targeted warheads possibly capable of penetrating ballistic missile defenses.  According to a TASS report on May 6, Col.-Gen. Sergei Karakayev, commander of the Russian Strategic Missile Forces, said Russia will move their new l28 Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missiles to bases at Uzhurskogo and Dombarovsky. The first location is near Krasnoyarsk in Siberia; the second is located in the Urals in the Orenburg Oblast and is a major ICBM base first built by the Soviets during the 1960s. In particular, Dombarovsky is a site associated with missile training exercises. For example, in the early 2000s the SMF held as many as seven launches from the Dombarovsky site using decommissioned missiles that delivered commercial payloads. The bases also are ideal for launching the new missile toward targets either in the United States or in NATO countries such as Germany, France, or the United Kingdom once it becomes operational. In the report, Karakayev also said a “completed missile complex” will hold the Sarmat as a “silo-based heavy missile” intended to replace the venerable ICBM. The Soviets first deployed the SS-18 in 1977 – the missile in its Cold War SS-18 MOD 4 configuration carried 10 multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles each with up to a 750 kiloton yield. An individual warhead had more than 20 times the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb. It was specifically designed to attack and destroy American ICBM silos and other hardened targets. Code named Satan by NATO, the SS-18 MOD 6 version of the ICBM currently deployed by Russia has a single 20-megaton warhead.

Lynch: States Can’t ‘Insist’ a Man is a Man and a Woman is a Woman, If Person Feels Otherwise(Source cnsnews.com) The U.S. Justice Department is putting the feelings of transgenders — men who think they are women and women who think they are men — above the privacy rights of the vast majority of people who don’t contest the biological facts of who they actually are. “And what we must not do, what we must never do, is turn on our neighbors, our family members, our fellow Americans for something that they cannot control and deny what makes them human,” Attorney General Loretta Lynch said on Monday.”[N]one of us can stand by when a state enters the business of legislating identity and insists that a person pretend to be something or someone that they are not.” But Lynch was referring to people who, in fact, are pretending to be something that — biologically — they are not. A man “identifying” as a woman is not a biological woman. And likewise, a woman “identifying” as a man is not a biological man. Until now, that is, when the federal government has determined that biological facts matter less than wishes and feelings. Lynch announced a federal civil rights lawsuit against North Carolina because of the state’s new law (HB-2), which requires transgender people in public facilities to use the restrooms consistent with their sex “as noted at birth,” rather than the restrooms that fit their “gender identity.” “We are seeking a court order declaring HB-2’s restroom restriction impermissibly discriminatory, as well as a statewide bar on its enforcement,” Lynch announced. She said the Justice Department also retains the option of “curtailing federal funding to the North Carolina Department of Public Safety and the University of North Carolina as this case proceeds.” This came hours after North Carolina sued the Justice Department “for their radical reinterpretation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which would prevent plaintiffs from protecting the bodily privacy rights of state employees while accommodating the needs of transgendered state employees.”

Pope Francis mulls opening door to female deacons in Church (Source AFP) Pope Francis said Thursday he would set up a commission to study the possibility of women entering the Catholic clergy, in his latest potentially historic opening on a vexed issue for the Church. In apparently off-the-cuff remarks the 79-year-old pontiff promised to examine whether women could join the clergy at the rank of deacon, one below a priest. The pledge came in a question and answer session with members of female religious orders during a meeting at the Vatican. In the exchanges, Francis said he had discussed the use of female deacons in the early centuries of the Church with experts on the subject but was not clear as to their exact role and status. “I believe, yes, it would do good for the Church to clarify this point,” he said, in comments first reported by the National Catholic Reporter and confirmed by the Vatican’s own newspaper Osservatore Romano. “I am in agreement. I will speak (in favor of doing) something like this.” He later added: “It seems useful to me to have a commission that would clarify this.” – Women pitifully under-represented – Progressives in the Catholic Church have long argued that women are pitifully under-represented in the hierarchy, despite the number of women in religious orders (700,000) far outweighing the number of priests and monks combined (470,000). Although deacons cannot celebrate mass on their own or hear confessions, they are ordained and can carry out many tasks in place of a priest, while remaining free to marry and have a family. Deacon tasks can include presiding over baptisms, weddings and funerals as well as prayer services. They also often play a role in parish management and in offering pastoral guidance to believers. Historians say women played this role in the first centuries of the Church, but the practice died out and calls for women to be allowed to become priests were categorically rejected by Pope John Paul II in 1994. A commission charged with studying the term “deaconess” in 2001 concluded there was no basis for ordaining women to the role. Historian Lucetta Scaraffia said ordaining female deacons would have “nothing to do” with the issue of female priests, but would recognise “the role that women already play in the Church. Francis has often championed the special qualities of the female sex, saying in December 2014: “Women are like strawberries on a cake — you always need more of them.” He has also repeatedly said since becoming pope in 2013 that he does not represent all Church teaching as being set in stone. He has tried to make the global institution more understanding, less judgemental in its approach to divorced, cohabiting and gay believers.

GEORGIA LAUNCHES U.S.-LED MILITARY DRILL DESPITE RUSSIAN WARNING (Source newsweek.com) Georgia has launched a two-week military exercise with NATO allies led by the U.S. despite Russia’s warnings that they have been following the preparations and consider Georgia’s actions provocative. Relations between Georgia and Russia took a severe turn for the worse in 2008 when, after years of political deadlock with separatists in two of its regions near its border with Russia, Georgia opted for a military solution. In response, Russia, who had supported separatists in both regions—South Ossetia and Abkhazia—advanced forces to fight Georgian troops away from the territories. Since then Russia has moved towards effectively incorporating the two regions under its leadership, while Georgia has refused to recognize them as anything but its sovereign territory, temporarily out of its control. Meanwhile, Georgia has also actively sought to join NATO, despite Russia repeatedly making clear that it considers any increase of NATO presence near its borders a threat. In the latest of these moves, Georgia kicked off the 2016  HYPERLINK “http://www.eur.army.mil/noblepartner/” \t “_blank” Noble Partner exercise on Wednesday. The drill sees 500 Georgian, 650 U.S. and 150 U.K. soldiers train together to improve the military-to-military relationship between NATO states and Georgia and to raise Georgia’s standards to NATO levels.

San Andreas fault ‘locked, loaded and ready to roll’ with big earthquake, expert says (Source latimes.com) Southern California’s section of the San Andreas fault is “locked, loaded and ready to roll,” a leading earthquake scientist said Wednesday at the National Earthquake Conference in Long Beach. The San Andreas fault is one of California’s most dangerous, and is the state’s longest fault. Yet for Southern California, the last big earthquake to strike the southern San Andreas was in 1857, when a magnitude 7.9 earthquake ruptured an astonishing 185 miles between Monterey County and the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles. It has been quiet since then — too quiet, said Thomas Jordan, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center.  “The springs on the San Andreas system have been wound very, very tight. And the southern San Andreas fault, in particular, looks like it’s locked, loaded and ready to go,” Jordan said in the opening keynote talk. Other sections of the San Andreas fault also are far overdue for a big quake. Further southeast of the Cajon Pass, such as in San Bernardino County, the fault has not moved substantially since an earthquake in 1812, and further southeast toward the Salton Sea, it has been relatively quiet since about 1680 to 1690. Here’s the problem: Scientists have observed that based on the movement of tectonic plates, with the Pacific plate moving northwest of the North American plate, earthquakes should be relieving about 16 feet of accumulated plate movement every 100 years. Yet the San Andreas has not relieved stress that has been building up for more than a century. A 2008 U.S. Geological Survey report warned that a magnitude 7.8 earthquake on the southern San Andreas fault would cause more than 1,800 deaths, 50,000 injuries, $200 billion in damage and severe, long-lasting disruptions. Among the predicted problems: The sewer system could be out of commission for six months.

Russia responds with 3 new military divisions to counter Nato’s build-up in Baltics (Source Yahoo)

Russia will be forced to take retaliatory measures if NATO deploys four extra battalions in Poland and the Baltic states, Interfax news agency quoted a senior Russian Foreign Ministry official as saying on Wednesday.

“This would be a very dangerous build-up of armed forces pretty close to our borders,” Andrei Kelin, a department head at the ministry, said. “I am afraid this would require certain retaliatory measures, which the Russian Defence Ministry is already talking about.”Russia will form three new military divisions to counter what it believes is the growing strength of The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) near its borders, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu announced on Wednesday.

China Test Fires Nuclear-Capable Missile into the South China Sea (Source Popular Mechanics)

China has apparently fired an intercontinental ballistic missile into the South China Sea, a provocative weapon test that-contrary to official statements-was likely meant to send a message to the United States and its neighbors in the region. News of the test, which was carried out on April 12th, had been leaked to the Washington Free Beacon. On April 19th, the Beacon  HYPERLINK “http://freebeacon.com/national-security/china-flight-tests-multiple-warhead-missile/” reported that two warheads carried by the missile had been tracked by U.S. satellites and regional sensors. The  HYPERLINK “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-41” Dong Feng (“East Wind”)-41 missile is China’s latest intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). The DF-41 can carry a single 1-megaton thermonuclear warhead or up to 10 smaller nuclear warheads. A three stage, solid fuel rocket, DF-41 reportedly has a range of 7,400 to 9,300 miles-making it the first Chinese missile with enough range to reach all of the continental United States.

The curious-and provocative-aspect of this test was the aiming point for the missile. Typically, Chinese missiles are launched from central China and sent westward. This time, the missile was aimed south at the South China Sea. This may be the first time China has launched an ICBM into the South China Sea. China  HYPERLINK “http://freebeacon.com/national-security/china-confirms-multiple-warhead-missile-test-south-china-sea/” claims that allegations the warheads landed in the South China Sea are “pure conjecture”, only saying that the missile was tested near the Sea. However, China also said that it had every right to conduct such tests within Chinese territory-a given unless that territory were in some way contested by others. China claims roughly ninety percent of the South China Sea, but some of that territory is also claimed by other countries.China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea have generated tension with many of its neighbors, particularly the Philippines and Vietnam, and is being actively opposed by the United States, Australia, and Japan. China claimed the test was not aimed at “any specific country or target”.

U.S. stands by South Korea defense talks despite China, Russia objections(Source Reuters)

The White House on Friday said talks to install a new anti-missile defense system in South Korea would continue in the wake of nuclear arms and missile tests by North Korea despite calls by China and Russia for the United States to back off. The United States and South Korea have begun talks on possible deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system after North Korea tested its fourth nuclear bomb on Jan. 6 and conducted missile tests. The nuclear test and missile launches violate U.N. resolutions against North Korea backed by Russia and China. U.S. and South Korean officials have expressed concern the North could attempt a fifth nuclear test in a show of strength ahead of its Workers’ Party congress, which begins on May 6.

North Korea test-fired what appeared to be two intermediate range ballistic missiles on Thursday, but both failed, according to the U.S. military. On Friday, the White House said it was still in talks with its close ally South Korea and that the system, if installed, would not threaten other countries. “Those discussions are ongoing,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters. “That equipment would be oriented toward the threat that is posed by North Korea, not oriented toward China or Russia.” Speaking at joint press briefing with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi earlier on Friday called on the United States to respect “legitimate concerns” of China and Russia over the missile system. “This move goes beyond the defensive needs of the relevant countries. If it is deployed it will directly impact China’s and Russia’s respective strategic security,” Wang said. “Not only does it threaten the resolution of the peninsula nuclear issue, it quite possibly could pour oil on the fire of an already tense situation, and even destroy strategic equilibrium on the peninsula.”

The US has deployed 2 F-22 fighter jets to Russia’s backyard Source businessinsider.com)

The US  has deployed two of its most advanced fighter jets to Romania in order to better keep an eye on Russian activity in the Black Sea, the Air Force Times  www.airforcetimes.com/story/military f-22s-continue-training-europe-land-romania/83489748/” reports. The two F-22 Raptors are part of a supporting US force that has been deployed to NATO member Romania. The aircraft are there as part of a mission intended to “bolster the security of NATO allies and partners in Europe, according to a US Air Force press release.

The F-22, the first truly operational fifth-generation fighter in the world, will be used to further increase interoperability between the US and fellow NATO nations as well as signal to Russia that the US will stand with NATO against any Russian aggression. “These aircraft have the ability to project air dominance quickly, at great distances, to defeat any possible threat,” US Lt. Gen. Timothy Ray said of the F-22 deployment in Romania at a press conference. The deployment comes soon after Russian military aircraft  HYPERLINK “http://www.businessinsider.com/russian-fighter-buzzed-us-destroyer-2016-4” repeatedly buzzed a US naval ship that was in international waters in the Baltic Sea. In response to that incident, US Secretary of State John Kerry “http://www.businessinsider.com/kerry-we-could-have-shot-down-the-russian-jet-that-buzzed-a-us-destroyer-2016-4” said that the ship would have been justified in shooting down the Russian aircraft. The US decision to place the F-22s in Europe also comes on the heels of dire predictions concerning NATO readiness to defend the Baltics in the event of a Russian invasion of the NATO member states.