If you had asked Donald Trump’s former Iran envoy Elliot Abrams last year how he assessed Iran's strength, he would have told you its fearsome array of armed affiliates was a powerful guarantee of its staying power.   “I would have thought Iran is riding high," the veteran US foreign policy hawk said. "Their system of terrorist proxies in the region is a brilliant system and it's working,” Abrams, the former special representative for Iran during the first...

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Turkey on Thursday for talks focused on a critical aspect of establishing stability in Syria: clashes in the north of the country between U.S.-backed Kurdish forces and Turkey-backed rebels.   As HTS and other groups gradually settle in the Syrian capital and other captured territories, various external players are actively establishing contacts with militant leaders. ▪️Yesterday, the head of the Turkish intelligence agency MIT,...

FBI Director Christopher Wray announced on Wednesday that he plans to resign in January, just prior to President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration.   "After careful consideration, I believe it is in the best interest of the bureau for me to serve until the end of the current administration in January and then step down," Wray stated in remarks shared with FBI employees.     Wray, who was appointed by Trump in 2017, has seen his relationship with the incoming president...

1993. The Independent interviews Osama Bin Laden, who was now apparently a simple "construction engineer and an agriculturalist" in Sudan.   All those interested in American left-wing propaganda must read the attached article! More so as it was penned by Robert Fisk, possibly the most prestigious western journalist in the Middle East over the past half century. This whitewashing of Osama bin Laden in the early 1990s was a crass reframing of him as a visionary, a pious Saudi...

  The 42nd President of the United States, Bill Clinton, repeatedly assured his Russian counterpart, Boris Yeltsin, that NATO’s expansion eastward was not targeted against Moscow.   Clinton acknowledged in conversations with his circle that Russia’s concerns regarding this were justified, declassified US documents show. According to the documents published by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, at a meeting with Yeltsin in...

Only few days after a Chinese bulk carrier destroyed two cables in the Baltic Sea in what appears as an act of sabotage, top officials from Beijing and Moscow sat down for their first meeting in a joint cooperation body for the Northern Sea Route.   "Although this is our first meeting in the Subcommission, we have already reached a series of agreements on safe shipping between our countries," Head of Rosatom Aleksei Likhachev said in an opening remark in the recent...

On November 28, 2024, Kazakhstan’s capital Astana will host a regular session of the Collective Security Council (CSC) of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), which will be attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The six member-countries are Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan.   Signing, participants On May 15, 1992 the heads of Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan gathered in Uzbekistan’s...

The arrest warrant for war crimes “disgraces the rule of international law,” the famed jurist wrote in the WSJ.   Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz is gathering a “dream team” to defend Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant from war crimes charges that will be brought against them at the International Criminal Court (ICC), he wrote Sunday in The Wall Street Journal. The case is extremely important, he noted,...

As Germany plunges deeper into recession and the rubble of its once-mighty industrial base piles up, Angela Merkel has reappeared to remind everyone how the script was written.   In a rare interview with Der Spiegel, the former chancellor defended her decision to secure cheap Russian gas for Germany’s economy, while taking a jab at Ukraine and Poland for their hypocrisy. Merkel laid it out plainly: Poland and Ukraine were happy to profit from transit fees as Russian gas flowed...

French farmers launched new protests Tuesday against a proposed deal between the EU and the four South American countries of the Mercosur trade bloc. The French government is strongly opposed to the deal but protesters want French President Emmanuel Macron to do more to help amid rising discontent over foreign competition.  The French government is leading resistance against ratification of the trade agreement with the Mercosur bloc of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay that...

Russia is open to contacts with the US under the Donald Trump administration, the ball is in the US court, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with journalist Marina Kim.   "[Russian] President [Vladimir] Putin said at a meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club that he is always ready to communicate. It was not us who interrupted the communication: the ball is in the US court," Lavrov said in response to a question. At the same time, he emphasized that...

Donald Trump’s victory on Tuesday was so overwhelming that even his opponents seem to have gone quiet for a bit. Relatively speaking.   The important excerpts:  Israel Biden talked a strong game on Israel, but his administration was wet and leaky as hell. In fact, the Biden administration spent more time trying to perform regime change in Jerusalem than it ever did anywhere else. Now that Biden, Chuck Schumer and that gang are out, this is a good time to reaffirm the...