America

Russia's largest bank, Sberbank, has confirmed that it hired the consultancy of Tony Podesta, the elder brother of John Podesta who chaired Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, for lobbying its interests in the United States and proactively seeking the removal of various Obama-era sanctions, the press service of the Russian institution told TASS on Thursday.

"The New York office of Sberbank CIB indeed hired Podesta Group. Engagement of external consultants is part of standard business practices for us," Sberbank said.

Our Age Of Folly

Paul Craig Roberts

The United States has been growing progressively insane for a long time. For my generation, the realization descended upon us in the 1960s when the military/security complex convinced Americans that if we permitted Vietnamese nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh to unify Vietnam, the dominoes would fall until the Communist World Revolution had us in its grip. This despite the fact that Stalin had killed off the Trotskyist world revolutionaries and declared “Socialism in one country.”

On Tuesday morning, at the same time that Wikileaks was releasing the contents of "Vault 7" CIA-document dump, it was supposed to hold a press conference, which however was said to have suffered terminal technical difficulties. As a result, Wikileaks delayed it until now, at 9:45am Eastern on Thursday.

Watch it live below:

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Readers can submit questions on Twitter with the #askWL hashtag.

In an interview surely to get the blood of America's hyper-sensitive environmentalists boiling, which we sincerely hope doesn't result in any adverse harm to global temperatures, Trump's new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, appeared on CNBC to say that, among other things, the verdict is still out on man-made global warming.  Per CNBC:

While the Trump administration waits to decide if it will send 1,000 troops to Kuwait to fight ISIS, overnight the Washington Post reported that the US has sent several hundred Marines to Syria to support an allied local force aiming to capture the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa. Defence officials said they would establish an outpost from which they could fire artillery at IS positions some 32km (20 miles) away. US special forces are already on the ground, "advising" the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) alliance according to the BBC.