‘God help us!’ A pair of California wildfires are raging out of control (Source usatoday.com) A fast-growing wildfire forced tens of thousands of residents from their homes in northern California on Thursday. The Camp Fire has scorched over 28 square miles in Butte County, which is about 90 miles north of Sacramento, according to Cal Fire. By Thursday afternoon, fire officials said people have been injured and structures have been destroyed in the fire, though further details were not available. Acting California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in Butte County, where the fire is burning about 80 acres per minute, according to UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain. That’s equal to about 60 football fields per minute. “This fire is very dangerous, please evacuate if asked to do so!”, Cal Fire officials said on Twitter. Dozens of resources were being called in from throughout the state. An evacuation order was issued for areas of Paradise, a town of about 27,000 people, the Butte County Sheriff’s Office said. Fire officials said firefighters were working to access the area as the blaze continued to spread. A second significant wildfire, spurred by strong Santa Ana winds across Ventura County, flared up amid red-flag warnings later Thursday in Southern California.

Louis Farrakhan Chants ‘Death to America’ During Visit to Iran (Source nationalreview.com) Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan led chants of “death to America” on Sunday and derided American conceptions of democracy and freedom during a visit to Iran, planned as a show of support for the regime ahead of the re-implementation of U.S. sanctions. Farrakhan, a notorious anti-Semite who has been embraced by prominent liberal activists and lawmakers, railed against American policymakers for harassing the Iranian people and siding with Saudi Arabia in its proxy war with Iran in Yemen. “I understand how the enemies have plotted against the Iranian people and I would like to stay alongside you to stop their plots,” he said during a meeting with the secretary of Iran’s Expediency Council, Mohsen Rezaei, according to state-owned news agency Mehr. “Satan seeks to divide Muslims and wants them to kill each other, while God tells us in the Quran to be united.” During a subsequent speaking appearance at the University of Tehran law school, Farrakhan mocked America’s founding ideals while praising the Islamic conception of women’s rights and Iran’s strict enforcement of female modesty. “America has never been a democracy and has always leaned towards the wealthy and powerful class,” he said before leading the law students in chanting “Death to Israel” and “Death to America.”

Russia to replace US soybean exports to China amid escalating trade war (Source rt.com)

The ongoing trade conflict with Washington is forcing China to look for new suppliers of day-to-day produce to the domestic market. Russia is expected to be the answer when it comes to soybeans and other goods.

According to Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, the country may partially replace US as the leading exporter of soybeans to China. The nations are also planning to work more closely on deliveries of other agricultural goods, including pork, rice, poultry, fish, as well as developing joint logistics projects.

“Soybeans are in very big demand in China,” Medvedev told reporters Wednesday during his three-day visit to China.

“The Chinese market is huge as they import about 95 million tons of soybeans annually, including 30 million tons from the US.” China, the world’s biggest soybean importer, is currently involved in a long-standing trade dispute with the US. Beijing is seeking to diversify its food supplies after the volume of year-on-year soybean shipments from its overseas partner shrank by more than 80 percent in September.

“A certain part of the soy market has been made available. We agreed with the Chinese partners to hold a more active presence in this particular segment,” Medvedev said, stressing that the step provides Russia with a good opportunity to boost soybean production.

Over the past 10 years, Russia’s soybean production has been growing, with farmers expected to harvest a record 3.9 million tons in the current season that ends in 2019, Bloomberg reports citing projections by the US Department of Agriculture. Russia will reportedly ship up to 700,000 tons of the product abroad, which is still significantly less than Brazil, the world’s leading soybean exporter, which may sell more than 76 million tons this season.

France supporting Iran against US ‘trade policeman’ (Source middleeastmonitor.com)

France has vowed to fulfil plans to defy the US’ sanctions on Iran while increasing the international role of the euro in order to prevent Washington from acting as the world’s “trade policeman”.

France’s Minister of Economy and Finance, Bruno Le Maire, told the British newspaper Financial Times that Europe is planning the formation of a special financial channel to Iran in order to keep trade flowing with the country and assure its own “economic sovereignty”, with the aim of making the euro as powerful as the dollar.

“Europe refuses to allow the US to be the trade policeman of the world,” Le Maire stated in an interview in Brussels, emphasizing that Europe must “affirm our sovereignty” in regards to the US sanctions on Iran and its wider economic hegemony.

Trump imposes ‘unprecedented sanctions’ as Europe scrambles to save Iran deal

After President Donald Trump pulled out of the Iranian nuclear in May, the European Union – along with Russia and China – remained committed to the agreement, and has insisted on defying the sanctions and facilitating trade with Tehran.

On the Edge of Nuclear Armageddon: Donald Trump Welcomes in the Age of “Usable” Nuclear Weapons (Source globalresearch.ca)

Trump has launched a second nuclear age by rejecting the treaty that was meant to initiate the closing of the first one. The arms race was then slowed, but, alas, the competitors stumbled on through the end of the Cold War. Shutting that arms-contest down completely remained an unfinished task, in part because the dynamic of weapons reduction proved so reversible even before Donald Trump made it into the Oval Office. George W. Bush, for instance, struck a blow against arms control with his 2002 abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which rekindled Reagan’s Star Wars fantasy. The way Washington subsequently promoted missile defense systems in Europe, especially in Poland, where a nearly $5 billion missile contract was agreed to this year, empowered the most hawkish wing of the Kremlin, guaranteeing just the sort of Russian build-up that has indeed occurred.  President Trump’s cavalier and supremely ignorant readiness to walk away from America’s most solemn international commitments should offer us all a grim reminder of just how precious that nuclear weapons treaty regime has been. The most decisive covenant of all was the 1987 INF Treaty, which demonstrated that nuclear reductions are possible, and that the movement toward nuclear abolition is, too. The INF Treaty was the pin that has held the mechanism of hope together all these years. Now, our nihilistic president has pulled the pin, apparently mistaking that structure of human survival for a grenade, sure to blow.

China plans to ‘launch its own artificial moon’ by 2020 (Source independent.co.uk)

China is planning to launch its own “artificial moon” by the year 2020, it has been reported. The city of Chengdu has unveiled plans to replace the city’s streetlights with a satellite that will boost the glow of the real moon. The artificial moon will be able to light an area with a diameter of 10 to 80 kilometres. Wu Chunfeng, chairman of Chengdu aerospace science and technology microelectronics system research institute, announced the news and said that the artificial moon would be eight times brighter than the real moon, according to the People’s Daily. He added that the testing of the illumination started years ago and is now ready. The manmade moon will have a coating that can reflect light from the sun with solar panel-like wings. The angles of these wings can then be adjusted to allow the light to focus on a precise location, Asia Times reported.

The exact details of the spacecraft, the launch date and how the artificial moon would be maintained were not revealed. Officials from the city of Chengdu said they were hoping to save money on street lighting and also increase tourism.

Cuban president arrives in Russia for economic talks (Source Associated Press)

Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel arrived in Russia on Thursday for talks expected to focus on expanding economic ties between the two nations. As part of his three-day state visit, Diaz-Canel is set to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union poured billions of dollars in supplies and subsidies to Cuba, its staunchest Latin American ally. But ties withered after the 1991 Soviet collapse as Russia, hit by an economic meltdown, withdrew its economic aid to Cuba. Putin, who visited Cuba in 2000 and 2014, has sought to revive ties with the old Caribbean ally. Earlier this month, Russian officials have signed contracts worth $260 million to modernize Cuban energy facilities and a metal factory. The two countries have also talked about expanding military ties.

Soviet warships and military aircraft regularly used Cuban bases during the Cold War, and Cuba hosted a Soviet electronic spying facility in Lourdes, near Havana.

Putin closed the Lourdes intelligence facility in 2001 as he sought to establish warmer ties with the United States during his first presidential term. But U.S.-Russian relations have steadily worsened, plunging to post-Cold War lows after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, and the Kremlin has sought to rebuild ties with Cuba.

The business daily Kommersant reported earlier this month that Russia plans to provide a $50 million loan to Cuba to help it maintain and modernize its Soviet-built weapons.

America Is on the Brink of a Nervous Breakdown (Source Rutherford.org) “As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.” ― Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas

Yet another shooting. Yet another smear of ugliness, hatred and violence. Yet another ratcheting up of the calls for the government to clamp down on the citizenry by imposing more costly security measures without any real benefit, more militarized police, more surveillance, more widespread mental health screening of the general population, more threat assessments and behavioral sensing warnings, more gun control measures, more surveillance cameras with facial recognition capabilities, more “See Something, Say Something” programs aimed at turning Americans into snitches and spies, more metal detectors and whole-body imaging devices at so-called soft targets, more roaming squads of militarized police empowered to do more stop-and-frisk searches, more fusion centers to centralize and disseminate information to law enforcement agencies, and more government monitoring of what Americans say and do, where they go, what they buy and how they spend their time.

All of these measures play into the government’s hands.

All of these measures add up to more government power, less real security and far less freedom.

As we have learned the hard way, the phantom promise of safety in exchange for restricted or regulated liberty is a false, misguided doctrine that has no basis in the truth.

Things are falling apart.

When things start to fall apart or implode, ask yourself: who stands to benefit? In most cases, it’s the government that stands to benefit by amassing greater powers at the citizenry’s expense.

Unfortunately, the government’s answer to civil unrest and societal violence, as always, will lead us further down the road we’ve travelled since 9/11 towards totalitarianism and away from freedom. With alarming regularity, the nation is being subjected to a spate of violence that not only terrorizes the public but also destabilizes the country’s fragile ecosystem, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry. Clearly, America is being pushed to the brink of a national nervous breakdown.

PUTIN TO WESTERN ELITES: PLAY-TIME IS OVER (Source cluborlov.blogspot.com)

Most people in the English-speaking parts of the world missed Putin’s speech at the Valdai conference in Sochi this is probably the most important political speech since Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech of March 5, 1946. The Russian blogger chipstone summarized the most salient points from Putin speech as follows:

1. Russia will no longer play games and engage in back-room negotiations over trifles. But Russia is prepared for serious conversations and agreements, if these are conducive to collective security, are based on fairness and take into account the interests of each side.
2. All systems of global collective security now lie in ruins. There are no longer any international security guarantees at all. And the entity that destroyed them has a name: The United States of America.
3. The builders of the New World Order have failed, having built a sand castle.Whether or not a new world order of any sort is to be built is not just Russia’s decision, but it is a decision that will not be made without Russia.
4. Russia favors a conservative approach to introducing innovations into the social order,but is not opposed to investigating and discussing such innovations, to see if introducing any of them might be justified.
5. Russia has no intention of going fishing in the murky waters created by America’s ever-expanding “empire of chaos,”and has no interest in building a new empire of her own (this is unnecessary; Russia’s challenges lie in developing her already vast territory). Neither is Russia willing to act as a savior of the world, as she had in the past.
6. Russia will not attempt to reformat the world in her own image, but neither will she allow anyone to reformat her in their image. Russia will not close herself off from the world, but anyone who tries to close her off from the world will be sure to reap a whirlwind.
7. Russia does not wish for the chaos to spread, does not want war, and has no intention of starting one. However, today Russia sees the outbreak of global war as almost inevitable, is prepared for it, and is continuing to prepare for it.  Russia does not war—nor does she fear it.
8. Russia does not intend to take an active role in thwarting those who are still attempting to construct their New World Order – until their efforts start to impinge on Russia’s key interests. Russia would prefer to stand by and watch them give themselve s as many lumps as their poor heads can take. But those who manage to drag Russia into this process, through disregard for her interests, will be taught the true meaning of pain.
9. In her external, and, even more so, internal politics,Russia’s power will rely not on the elites and their back-room dealing, but on the will of the people.

Germany Celebrates Charlemagne (Source thetrumpet.com)

Charlemagne. The king. “The Great.” The eighth-century ruler who united much of Western Europe under a theocracy known as the Holy Roman Empire. Today he’s celebrated as a model for Europe to follow. But is Charlemagne’s heritage something to celebrate?

From September 23-30, the Aachen Cathedral, founded by Charlemagne, celebrated its 40-year anniversary as a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site. About 73,000 people attended the weeklong festival, which involved church services, concerts, cultural events, lectures, pilgrimages, tours, a poetry slam, music and a special light show. The focus was Charlemagne’s legacy. The cathedral is a symbol of how Charlemagne united Europe politically and religiously. The anniversary celebration included political and religious speakers. The ceremony’s opening service was led by Aachen’s bishop, Dr. Helmut Dieser. Following his sermon, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and North-Rhine Westphalia State Premier Armin Laschet delivered opening remarks. “Aachen is special,” Steinmeier said. “If a federal president comes to a place twice in half a year, there must be something special”. During Steinmeier’s previous visit, he went on an in-depth tour of the cathedral, which houses Charlemagne’s throne. Although Charlemagne was a political emperor, he set his throne in the middle of this Catholic cathedral.