NC Renegades

Russian strategic air forces fired six new, precision-strike cruise missiles in test launches Friday amid new tensions between Moscow and the West over the crisis in Ukraine.

Russia’s Defense Ministry announced Friday that the missile firings took place during exercises involving eight Tu-95 Bear bombers—the same type of strategic bomber recently intercepted 50 miles off the California coast by U.S. jets.

Russian bombers, meanwhile, continued saber-rattling air defense zone incursions against Canada’s arctic and in Europe over the Baltic Sea.

On Monday, Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoygu announced that Russian military forces had launched a large-scale “surprise” readiness exercise that was ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

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Germany Gives Up On Trying To Repatriate Its Gold, Will Leave It In The Fed’s “Safe Hands”

Germany has decided its gold is safe in American hands.

Surging mistrust of the euro during Europe’s debt crisis fed a campaign to bring Germany’s entire $141 billion gold reserve home from New York and London. Now, after politics shifted in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition, the government has concluded that stashing half its bullion abroad is prudent after all.

“The Americans are taking good care of our gold,” Norbert Barthle, the budget spokesman for Merkel’s Christian Democratic bloc in parliament, said in an interview. “Objectively, there’s absolutely no reason for mistrust.”

Ending talk of repatriating the world’s second-biggest gold reserves removes a potential irritant in U.S.-German relations. It’s also a rebuff to critics including the anti-euro Alternative for Germany party, which says all the gold should return to Frankfurt so it can’t be impounded to blackmail Germany into keeping the currency union together.

The Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank, sent a delegation to the New York Fed’s vault in 2012 for spot checks on the hoard. As the gold’s guardian, the Frankfurt-based Bundesbank is obliged to ensure its safety. It says it’s sensible to store part of the reserves outside the country so they can be swapped more easily for foreign currency in an emergency.

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h/t Vince M

(Zerohedge)   Those living during the decline of Rome were likely unaware that anything was happening. The decline took a couple of hundred years, and anyone living during the decline only saw a small part of what was happening and likely never noticed it as anything other than ordinary.

Countries don’t have genetically determined life spans. Nor do they die quickly, unless the cataclysm of some great war does them in. Even in such extreme cases, there are usually warning signs, which are more obvious in hindsight than at the time.

Few citizens of a dying nation recognize the signs. Most are too busy trying to live their lives, sometimes not an easy task.  If death occupies their mind, it is with respect to themselves, a relative or a friend. Most cannot conceive of the death of a nation.

A Country Dies Slowly First

For those interested, signs or symptoms precede death for a country often as they do for a person. There is a pattern that involves the following:

1. The Economy

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U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met Iraq’s prime minister in Baghdad on Monday to push for a more inclusive government, even as Baghdad’s forces abandoned the border with Jordan, leaving the entire Western frontier outside government control.

Sunni tribes took the Turaibil border crossing, the only legal crossing point between Iraq and Jordan, after Iraqi security forces fled, Iraqi and Jordanian security sources said.

The tribes were negotiating to hand the post over to insurgents from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant who took control of two main crossings with Syria over the weekend.

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The longest-serving member of the influential New York delegation, he was one of the founders of the Congressional Black Caucus and over time came to represent one of the standards of Democratic liberalism.

But the campaign for the Democratic nomination for his seat, to be decided in a primary Tuesday, has turned into a debate about whether Rangel has stayed too long in office and whether he still best represents constituents’ interests.

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h/t John P

Israel carried out nine strikes against Syrian military targets after midnight Monday, June 23, in retaliation for the Kornet rocket attack which killed an Israeli boy and injured two others a few hours earlier. They were conducted by air strikes and Spike NLOS anti-tank missiles (Tamuz), against Syrian firing positions, its 90th Brigade command center in Quneitra and three battalions.

The IDF Spokesman called the strikes a direct response to ongoing cross-border aggression which culminated in Sunday’s deadly missile attack.

The deadly rocket attack was fired from a Syrian army position in the village of Ahmadiyeh outside the Golan town of Quneitra. It hit truck in which Muhammad Karaka, 12, from the Galilee village of Arraba and his father Fahmi, a defense ministry contractor working on the Golan border fence at Tel Hazaka, were sitting. The boy was killed and his father and a worker injured.

The IDF said: “We identified precise hits on the targets,” following “the gravest provocation which followed a series of terrorist attacks in recent months against Israel military positions in the border region in general and this area in particular.”

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The recent turmoil in Iraq brought on by the rise of the Sunni extremist group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has ironically struck a blow to the American Left’s endlessly repeated narrative that there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq prior to the war.

The Obama administration claims that the weapons in that facility, which include sarin, mustard gas, and nerve agent VX, manufactured to prosecute the war against Iran in the 1980s, do not pose a threat because they are old, contaminated and hard to move. “We do not believe that the complex contains CW materials of military value and it would be very difficult, if not impossible to safely move the materials,” said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki.

The administration’s dubious rationale is based on information provided by the Iraq Study Group, which was tasked with finding WMDs in the war’s aftermath. They found the chemical weapons at Al Muthanna, but they determined that both Iraq wars and inspections by the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) had successfully dismantled the facility, and that the remaining chemical weapons were rendered useless and sealed in bunkers. The report called the weapons facility “a wasteland full of destroyed chemical munitions, razed structures, and unusable war-ravaged facilities,” the 2004 report stated.

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