Israeli forces injure 80 Gazans

Israeli forces have attacked Palestinians taking part in an anti-occupation protest along the edge of the besieged Gaza Strip, leaving more than 80 people injured.

Ashraf al-Qedra, a spokesman for Gaza’s Health Ministry, said that at least 83 Palestinians had sustained various injuries during the rallies east of Gaza and along a fence separating the enclave from occupied lands on Friday.

The rallies have been held every week since March 30 last year. The Palestinians demand the right to return for those driven out of their homeland by Israeli aggression. Israeli troops have killed over 260 Palestinians since the beginning of the rallies — called the “Great March of Return” — and wounded 26,000 others, according to the Gazan Health Ministry.

A United Nations (UN) fact-finding mission found earlier that Israeli forces committed rights violations during their crackdown against the Palestinian protesters in Gaza that may amount to war crimes.

https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2019/04/05/592662/Israeli-forces-injure-Gazans-80

Over 10,000 Palestinians protest at Gaza border, 70 injured

https://www.timesofisrael.com/around-9000-palestinians-said-protesting-at-gaza-border-several-injured/

The Globalization of War. America’s “Long War” against Humanity

America’s hegemonic project in the post 9/11 era is the “Globalization of War” whereby the U.S.-NATO military machine –coupled with covert intelligence operations, economic sanctions and the thrust of “regime change”— is deployed in all major regions of the world. The threat of pre-emptive nuclear war is also used to black-mail countries into submission.

This “Long War against Humanity” is carried out at the height of the most serious economic crisis in modern history. It is intimately related to a process of global financial restructuring, which has resulted in the collapse of national economies and the impoverishment of large sectors of the World population.

The ultimate objective is World conquest under the cloak of “human rights” and “Western democracy”.

The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

Under a global military agenda, the actions undertaken by the Western military alliance (U.S.-NATO-Israel) in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, Ukraine, Syria and Iraq are coordinated at the highest levels of the military hierarchy. We are not dealing with piecemeal military and intelligence operations. The July-August 2014 attack on Gaza by Israeli forces was undertaken in close consultation with the United States and NATO. The actions in Ukraine and their timing coincided with the onslaught of the attack on Gaza.

In turn, military undertakings are closely coordinated with a process of economic warfare which consists not only in imposing sanctions on sovereign countries but also in deliberate acts of destabilization of financial and currencies markets, with a view to undermining the enemies’ national economies.

The United States and its allies have launched a military adventure which threatens the future of humanity. As we go to press, U.S.and NATO forces have been deployed in Eastern Europe including Ukraine. U.S. military intervention under a humanitarian mandate is proceeding in sub-Saharan Africa. The U.S. and its allies are threatening China under President Obama’s “Pivot to Asia”.

In turn, military maneuvers are being conducted at Russia’s doorstep which could potentially lead to escalation.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-globalization-of-war-americas-long-war-against-humanity/5426125

The Bank Of Japan Bought 5.6 Trillion Yen In Stocks Last Year

There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.

- Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

In recent years, thanks to central bank intervention in virtually every asset class, writing about capital markets in the context of some valuation or fundamental analysis framework has become a laughable, surreal, and self-defeating exercise, and here is a perfect example why.

For one reason or another, overseas investors dumped Japanese stocks by the largest margin in 31 years in the fiscal year ended Sunday, according to official market data: specifically, market participants abroad unloaded about 5.63 trillion yen ($50 billion) worth of shares on a net basis, the Tokyo Stock Exchange reported Thursday, for a second straight year of net selling and the highest sell-off since 1987.

And yet this barely caused a ripple in asset prices for one simple reason: the Bank of Japan's asset purchases absorbed all the bleeding, exposing the central bank's outsize role in the market. Indeed, as the Nikkei adds, this near-record liquidation was matched nearly yen for yen by the BOJ's pumping of money into the economy through asset purchases, with the central bank buying 5.65 trillion yen worth of equity!

Of course, there were legitimate reasons why foreign investors felt the urge to liquidate Japanese holdings: international investors unloaded Japanese shares as they became alarmed by concerns about a global slowdown. With many Japanese manufacturers reliant on exports, overseas analysts cut their recommendations for those stocks amid China's decelerating economy and Beijing's trade war with the US.

Last July, the world's largest asset manager, BlackRock, downgraded its investment stance on Japanese equities to "neutral" from "overweight", the first such revision in about 20 months.

Separately, the world's 3rd latest asset manager, State Street Global Advisors, shrank its portfolio allocation in equities during the latter half of 2018, citing the protracted Sino-U.S. trade war and how that would affect risk assets. The investment house also downgraded its recommendation for Japanese equities from neutral this year, citing the risk of yen appreciation.

In light of such prevailing bearishness among foreign investors, one would think the Nikkei got clobbered, and yet the broadest Japanese index is now above where it was this time last year. Why? Because in its attempt to preserve confidence and avoid what could be a potentially devastating asset selloff in a world in which stock markets are the leading indicators for regional and global economies, the BOJ stepped up its purchases of Japanese stocks through ETFs. A first among central banks, the program began in 2010 when the Nikkei Stock Average was trading below 10,000 points. The central bank's stated objective then was "to lower the risk premium, and the purchasing volume stood at 450 billion yen."

That was just for popular cover, because in 2016, the BOJ raised its annual ETF purchasing goal to 6 trillion yen.

Since then, Kuroda unleashed an unprecedented stock buying rampage and as of Wednesday, the central bank's estimated aggregate ETF balance totaled 29 trillion yen (about quarter trillion dollars), which is equivalent to nearly 5% of the market capitalization on the TSE's first section.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-05/bank-japan-bought-57-trillion-stocks-last-year

“The Owner”: The Rise of Eduardo Elsztain and the Coming End of Argentina’s Democracy

With the backing and funding of the global elite, Eduardo Elsztain and his closest associates have taken control of Argentina’s real estate, electricity, agriculture, and finance industries. His next target? Argentina’s election system.

BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA – It seemed like a longshot, but anything was possible in the mind of an ambitious, 30-year-old Eduardo Elsztain. Elsztain, then living in New York, had landed a meeting with the wealthy Hungarian-American financier George Soros, a meeting that the bulk of media reports covering Elsztain’s rise to prominence claim was arranged purely by chance. Though Elsztain was inexperienced and unknown at the time, Soros saw something he liked in the ambitious Argentine, so much so that he gave him $10 million without a second thought.

According to Elsztain’s recollection, “We talked for an hour or so, and then he asked how much money I thought I could handle. I told him I could manage $10 million.” Soros, as Elsztain remembers it, simply said “Okay, no problem.” Soros later explained his seemingly impulsive investment by saying that Elsztain “knew when to sell and when to buy.”

Soros’ investment not only changed Elsztain’s fate, but Argentina’s. With that $10 million in newly secured funding, Elsztain and his close associate Marcelo Mindlin transformed Elsztain’s grandfather’s company Inversiones y Representaciones S.A. (“Investments and Brokerage, Inc.”, better known by its Spanish acronym IRSA) into Argentina’s largest business empire. Indeed, through IRSA, Elsztain has become not only the country’s largest landowner and real estate developer, but also the dominant force in the country’s massive beef and agriculture industry, its gold mining industry, and its banking system. As a result, he has been dubbed by the Argentine press as simply “The Landowner.”

https://www.mintpressnews.com/the-owner-the-rise-of-eduardo-elsztain-and-the-coming-end-of-argentinas-democracy/256959/

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>>6062741

As president of the bank, Espartaco Rojo had sold the bank’s privatization to the country and to its Congress by asserting that he would receive, at minimum, $3 billion for the bank’s privatization, funds that would then be placed in a new Federal Fund for Regional Infrastructure that would finance the building of public works throughout the country — a promise that was never fulfilled, as only $1.2 billion was received and the fund did not build any public works.

Overseeing the privatization, along with Espartaco Rojo, was then-Economy Minister Roque Fernández, a neoliberal “Chicago Boy” who was also a former World Bank and IMF official. Calls were later made to investigate Fernández and Espartaco Rojo and other parties involved in the “highly irregular” privatization of the bank, but went nowhere. One of the key people accused of involvement in illegal activities that led to the bank’s privatization is Daniel Marx, who was chief negotiator of Argentina’s external debt from 1989 to 1993 and is closely linked to the global financial elite through his investment bank, Quantum Finanzas.

After the privatization, Espartaco Rojo stayed on as the bank’s president until 2000. The president of the bank after Espartaco Rojo was Miguel Kiguel who had been undersecretary of finance and chief advisor to the minister of the economy of Argentina under Menem and, most crucially, chief economist at the World Bank at the very time that the World Bank was pressuring Argentina’s government to privatize Banco Hipotecario.

After the bank’s privatization, many of Elsztain’s associates were rewarded with positions on the bank’s board, including Saúl Zang and Ernesto Viñes, as well as Mario Blejer, who is the bank’s vice president. Blejer was a senior adviser to the IMF for decades, as well as a former president of Argentina’s Central Bank. As president of the Central Bank, he attempted to force the dollarization of the Argentine economy during its collapse and debt default, a crisis engineered by Menem and Cavallo’s policies. Blejer is also a long-time associate of Elsztain and a member of IRSA’s board of directors, as well as a former adviser to the Bank of England, and was considered a front-runner to head Israel’s Central Bank in both 2013 and 2018.

Another notable director at the bank was Jacobo Julio Driezzen, former alternate executive director of the IMF, sub-secretary of finances at the Economy Ministry during the lead-up to Argentina’s economic collapse, and executive director of Galicia Capital Markets, a subsidiary of Banco Galicia, one of Argentina’s largest private banks.

As will be shown in an upcoming article in this series, the privatization of Banco Hipotecario was just one of many “irregular” privatizations during the presidency of Carlos Menem. That article will also reveal how Menem’s policies, as well as those of his economy ministers, directly resulted in the economic crisis Argentina faced in the early 2000s, in which the global elite — including controversial figures connected to Eduardo Elsztain, Henry Kissinger, the Rockefellers, and others — sought to use this engineered crisis to pressure Argentina’s government to “swap” their debt for the entirety of Patagonia.

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>>6062767

Elsztain representing Rockefeller, Rothschild interests in Argentina

As Argentine newspaper La Nación noted in 2005:

[Elsztain is] the Argentine businessman with the greatest [international] contacts in the business world … and, like no other Argentine, has a direct channel to many of the world’s wealthiest men, who in many cases become his [Elsztain’s] partner in local projects.”

Indeed, Elsztain and his associates are often the avenue through which international oligarchs insert themselves into Argentina’s economy and politics, first for Soros and now for much more powerful figures.

The Council of the Americas (COA) was originally founded in 1963 by David Rockefeller as the Business Group for Latin America, which two years later became known as the Council for Latin America and then the Center for Inter-American Relations before undergoing a final name change. From its founding to its current state, the COA has been the voice of the multinational corporations (and the oligarchs behind them) that represent the vast majority of U.S.-based private investment in Latin America. The organization is often described as the Latin American equivalent of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which was chaired by David Rockefeller for several decades and has long been heavily funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. David Rockefeller founded the COA while serving as CFR chairman.

Rockefeller was the COA chairman from 1981 to 1992 and was honorary chairman until his death in 2017. The vast majority of the directors on COA’s board are executives of Latin American operations of major European and U.S. multinational corporations such as Shell Oil, JP Morgan, PepsiCo, Chevron, Boeing, Citigroup and Microsoft. One of the group’s chairmen after Rockefeller was John Negroponte, who was involved in the Reagan era cover-up of U.S. support for Latin American death squads and was deeply involved in the creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was the “brainchild” of COA. Negroponte also served as U.S. ambassador to Iraq and later deputy secretary of state under George W. Bush and was the first Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Negroponte is currently COA chairman emeritus and on its board of directors.

The current COA chairman is Andrés Gulski, a former IMF official and Santander bank executive who is currently CEO and President of AES power company, which — alongside Mindlin and Lewis’ Pampa Energia — is one of the top electricity producers in Argentina. Gulski also served in Venezuela’s ministry of finance in the U.S.-backed, pre-Chávez government and more recently was on Barack Obama’s Export Council. COA’s current president and CEO is Susan Segal, a former JP Morgan executive who “was actively involved in the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s, sitting on many Advisory Committees as well as serving as chairperson for the Chilean and Philippine Advisory Committees” while the former country was ruled by a brutal, U.S.-backed military dictatorship. She also received an award from Colombia’s then-President Alvaro Uribe, who once led Colombia’s right-wing narco-death squads.

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Russian Jets Pound Idlib Terrorists, Kurdish Rebels Attack Turkish Proxies

On April 4, the Afrin Liberation Forces (ALF) announced that their units had carried out a series of attacks on Turkish-backed militants. According to the ALF, on April 2, Kurdish fighters destroyed a bulldozer of Turkish-backed militants with an anti-tank guided missile near the town of Mare. On April 3, ALF members attacked a base of the Turkish-backed 55th Brigade near the city of Azaz, east of Afrin. At least three militants were reportedly injured in the attack.

The ALF is a brand of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), which has been created in an attempt to distance the group from constant attacks on Turkey-led forces in the region of Afrin. The YPG is a core of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and official YPG statements providing details into attacks on the Turkish Army and its proxies, which were observed in 2018, were fueling tensions between Ankara and Washington. Now, when the YPG rebranded its units attacking Turkish targets, the US has an opportunity to claim that its ‘local ally’ is not involved in these developments.

On April 3, Russian warplanes conducted a new series of raids against terrorist targets in the Idlib de-escalation zone. This time airstrikes hit Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham positions at the hill of Nabi Ayoub, which is located in the area of Jabal Zawiya.

The April 3 strike was the first aerial attack on Idlib terrorists since March 22. Back then, warplanes of the Russian Aerospace Forces conducted a series of airstrikes near the towns of al-Fu’ah and Kafriya in eastern Idlib.

A low intensity of this Russian activity demonstrates that the widely-speculated Syrian Army operation in the Idlib demilitarized zone is not expected anytime soon.

On April 4, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Moscow for negotiations on the situation in Syria with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Following the US recognition of the occupied Golan Heights as a part of Israel, Tel Aviv is aiming to consolidate its gains on the diplomatic front. Another goal of the Israeli leadership to undermine the Russian-Iranian cooperation in the region. However, so far, these efforts have been unsuccessful.

Israel’s ImageSat International released satellite images showing two buildings, which were hit in the March 27 Israeli airstrikes on the Shaykh Najjar Industrial Zone, northeast of the city of Aleppo. Both buildings are located in the northwestern part of the industrial zone, according to ImageSat’ photos. One of them appears to be a storage hangar.

Israeli media claimed that Iranian forces were using both buildings for military purposes. However, there has been no evidence to support this claim so far. Videos released from the ground shows that the targeted buildings were a kind of industrial facilities.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/russian-jets-pound-idlib-terrorists-kurdish-rebels-attack-turkish-proxies/5673726

Army Announces Unit Deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq and Korea

U.S. Army brigade combat teams will deploy this summer to Afghanistan, Iraq and Korea to participate in ongoing rotations, according to recent Army announcements.

The 82nd Airborne Division's 3rd Brigade Combat Team, stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, will deploy to Afghanistan to replace 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, in support of Operation Freedom's Sentinel, a March 29 news release states.

"Our great paratroopers are honored to answer our nation's call to deploy overseas," Col. Art Sellers, commander of the 3rd BCT, said in the release. "We stand eager and ready to work alongside our Afghan and coalition partners toward mission success in support of Operation Freedom's Sentinel."

The Army will deploy the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, out of Fort Wainwright, Alaska, to replace the 101st Airborne Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team in support of Operation Inherent Resolve in Iraq, according to another news release.

"We are privileged to be joining the international coalition that will defeat ISIS and set conditions for increased regional stability," Col. Matthew Brown, commander of the 1st SBCT, said in the release, referring to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. "The Arctic Wolves are trained, equipped and exceptionally well led. … The brigade has readied itself for any mission."

Meanwhile, the 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, at Fort Hood, Texas, will replace the 1st Armored Division's 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team in Korea.

"The Greywolf brigade is a highly trained and professional team of soldiers, always ready to answer our nation's call," Col. Kevin Capra, commander of the 3rd ABCT, said in a news release. "We look forward to once again working with our Korean partners and strengthening our nation's alliance. After months of intense training, I know our troopers are ready and able to support this mission."

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/04/05/army-announces-unit-deployments-afghanistan-iraq-and-korea.html

Trump to Skip White House Press Dinner for Third Year in a Row

President Donald Trump told reporters on April 5 that he would skip the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner scheduled for later this month.

Trump’s comments confirm that he will not attend the event for the third year in a row. As he was leaving the White House on his trip to the southern border in California, he told reporters that the event was not to his liking.

Instead, he said he would hold one of his MAGA-style rallies as a counter-program to the April 27 press dinner. The president’s rallies often gather tens of thousands of supporters. In a recent rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Trump drew in 14,000 supporters who filled the Van Andel Arena stadium to capacity, with nearly 20,000 outside.

“The dinner is so boring and so negative that we’re going to hold a very positive rally instead,” he said.

Presidents and first ladies have traditionally attended the event, and a number of reporting awards also are distributed at the dinner. Trump has not been to the dinner since he took office but had suggested he might appear this year after organizers scrapped the usual format featuring a comedian and instead invited Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Chernow to speak.

Trump became the first president since Ronald Reagan to skip the dinner. Reagan did not attend in 1981 because he was recovering from an assassination attempt.

The association this year decided to shift to a featured speaker instead of a comic after a sharply anti-Trump performance last year by comedian Michelle Wolf that some thought was too pointed against White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and other White House staff.

Chernow, a biographer of presidents and statesmen including George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, is expected to speak about the importance of the First Amendment.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/trump-to-skip-white-house-press-dinner-for-third-year-in-a-row_2868433.html