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LOA Today – 08.11.16

Are you listening? If you listen closely, the universe and the many players and events in your life are giving you important clues to help you live more happily, successfully, and deliberately. But so many of us go through life failing to listen closely to the clues we receive. This week we discuss this key skill and how listening helps us to attract what we most want to attract in our lives.

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Brown University – War deaths reach 173,000 in Afghanistan, Pakistan

The combined, cumulative death toll of war in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2001 is 173,000, with 183,000 others seriously injured, according to a new study. The Costs of War, based at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, released the data on the human costs of a decade and a half of war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The …

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ROBERT FISK – The Sultan and the Tsar: Erdogan Travels to Russia

So the Sultan travels to see the Tsar at the royal seat of St Petersburg. And the Caliph of Damascus will watch from Syria with the conviction that Ba’ath Party policy has once again proved its worth. The policy? Wait. And wait. And wait. For just as Turkey’s power over Syria – its Pakistan-like role of conduit for Arab Gulf money and arms to the civil war, its smuggling routes to Isis, al-Qaeda (or Jabhat al-Nusra or Fatah el-Sham …

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Thomas Gaist – Washington Escalates Covert Backing for Al Qaeda Militias in Aleppo

US-backed militias fighting against the Syrian government of Bashar al Assad have broken through the Russian and Syrian government encirclement of their positions inside the war-ravaged northern Syrian city of Aleppo, according to Western media. During fierce battles over the weekend, the US-backed, Islamist-led militia coalition known as Jaysh al Fateh overran military bases in southwest Aleppo and secured an …

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Paul R. Pillar – More Neocon Excuses to Bomb Syria

The complicated, multidimensional nature of the Syrian civil war continues to discourage clear thinking in debate about U.S. policy toward Syria. The involvement in the conflict of multiple protagonists who are each anathema to the American debaters but who are opposed to each other within Syria is a fundamental complication that too often gets ignored. Basic questions of what U.S. interests …

An image released on July 28, 2016 by Al-Manara al-Bayda, the official news arm of Al-Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, allegedly shows the group's chief Abu Mohammad al-Jolani at an undisclosed location, in the first ever picture to be released of him.
The Al-Nusra Front - which is expected to announce its break from Al-Qaeda - is a jihadist group allied with rebels fighting Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad. Al-Nusra, an offshoot of the Islamic State in Iraq, Al-Qaeda's former Iraqi affiliate, first emerged in January 2012 -- 10 months after the start of anti-government protests that were brutally repressed by the Assad regime, leading to a multi-sided conflict which continues today. The Arabic writing reads: "Soon, a televised speech by Sheikh Abu Mohammad al-Jolani.” / AFP PHOTO / Al-Manara Al-Baydaa / Handout

Gareth Porter – The sham rebrand of al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front

The Nusra Front’s adoption of the new name Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and claim that it has separated itself from al-Qaeda was designed to influence US policy, not to make the group any more independent of al-Qaeda. The objective of the manoeuvre was to head off US-Russian military cooperation against the jihadist group, renamed last week, based at least in part on the …

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Trevor Timm – The US is bombing Libya again. It’s a too-familiar vicious cycle

Just five years after bombing Libya to dispose of Muammar Gaddafi, the US is now officially bombing the country again, this time against alleged Isis terrorist strongholds that cropped up in the power vacuum created by the last bombing. It’s yet another episode of the War on Terror Circle of Life, where the US bombs a country and then funnels weapons into …

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At any skill level, making art reduces stress hormones

Whether you’re Van Gogh or a stick-figure sketcher, a new Drexel University study found that making art can significantly reduce stress-related hormones in your body. Although the researchers from Drexel’s College of Nursing and Health Professions believed that past experience in creating art might amplify the activity’s stress-reducing effects, their study found that everyone seems to benefit equally. “It was …

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New CIA Documents Reveal More Horrors of President Bush’s Torture Program

The CIA on Tuesday released dozens of documents detailing its torture and rendition program under the Bush administration, from the horrific treatment of detainees to the agency’s 2002 plan to ask the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) not to prosecute interrogators. The heavily redacted trove of more than 50 documents was published in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit …

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WAYNE MADSEN – Uncle Sam’s Support for Terrorism Laid Bare. There are No “Moderate Terrorists”

The McClatchy news service scoop that Labib al-Nahhas, the Syrian foreign affairs director of al-Qaeda’s ally Ahrar ash-Sham, visited Washington, DC in December 2015 should have created a huge political stir in a presidential election year. However, the fact that the Obama administration has been consorting with terrorist allies of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and other …