The past fortnight proved to be a news editor’s dream. On the local, national and international scene there were many major news stories worthy of the No. 1 spot.
Locally, the 2015 special events season approached its climax with the Rib Cook Off, Balloon Races, Camel Races, Air Races and Street Vibrations. The official end of the season will occur with the upcoming El Dorado Great Italian Festival on Oct. 10-11.
Nationally, major news included the Pope’s visit to America, the arrival of China’s president for a Washington confab and the death of baseball legend Yogi Berra.
Internationally, the top story was Russia’s unforeseen bombing of Syrian rebel strongholds under the guise of attacking ISIS. The Russians even had the effrontery to give notice to the U.S. to have its planes removed from Syrian airspace a brief one hour before the Russian planes took off for their missions.
As usual, the U.S. State Department, Pentagon and White House were “surprised” when the Russian bombing took place. Actually, they should been forewarned by the speech Russian leader Vladimir Putin gave to the United Nations the day before. In that speech, Putin obviously blamed the U.S. for toppling established governments in the Mideast with no thought to the consequences. Putin’s speech followed Obama’s address to the UN in which the president continued to say the only way to defeat ISIS is to provide jobs to the terrorists. Following their speeches, the two world leaders had a 90-minute meeting, the topic of which remains undisclosed.
Following the Russian attack on Syrian rebels, whom the U.S. is supporting against Bashar Assad, a new word was inserted into the Obama regime’s lexicon. It was “deconfliction,”and it refers to talks between the two superpowers on how to avoid each other’s jet airplanes from crashing into one another.
The current situation in Syria is reminiscent of the long-ago Spanish Civil War, a proxy conflict that led eventually to World War II. Along those lines, Secretary of State John Kerry has been labelled as “Neville Chamberlain on steroids.”
Several wags at the morning coffee klatch in the Gold ‘n Silver Café in Reno have likened the current conflict between Obama and Putin to the old fashioned Charles Atlas ads where the bully kicks sand in the face of a recumbent victim. The most telling comment on the situation was, “Obama must enjoy having sand kicked in his face because he never rises from the prone position.”
The other big international story is the increasing flood of immigration of Mideast victims into Europe and the news that the Obama administration is considering admitting 200,000 of them into this country.
With the latest Russian power move into the Mideast grabbing the headlines, another Russia-linked story surfaced late last week when it was revealed through the release of more of Hillary Clinton’s emails that Russian hackers had tried to invade her private server. It was also revealed that one in 20 emails from the newly released batch contained classified material.
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