parliamentary elections

Vladimir Putin has accused foreign enemies of seeking to disrupt Russia’s upcoming parliamentary elections, and has ordered Russian security services to be extra vigilant.  The parliamentary elections are due to take place in September, and Putin says he has seen documents that prove “foreign enemies are preparing for these elections too“. Indiatimes.com reports: He added that foreign intelligence services had become more active in Russia last year, saying that 400 foreign spies and agents had been exposed and 23 of them had been prosecuted.

President Bashar Assad has announced that the parliamentary elections in Syria will be held on April 13, 2016. The announcement was made via an official statement released on Monday by Syria’s presidential office. It  came just hours after Russia and the US issued a joint statement on cessation of hostilities in this country. The ceasefire is due to take effect at midnight on February 27th. Their statement said the truce did not include ISIS and the al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front.

Maybe because between the specter of defaulting in under three months, the threat of handing over its gold to Deutsche Bank, or the reality of rampant hyperinflation and a collapsing society, the already crushed population of Venezuela did not have enough things to worry about, moments ago Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro unveiled a double whammy of "shock and awe" when the socialist president not only announced the latest devaluation of the country's official currency, but also presented his countrymen with the first gasoline price increase since 1996.

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

The ultimate cost of protecting the privileges of the few at the expense of the many is the dissolution of the social order that enabled the rule of the privileged few.

If Donald Trump has distanced himself from some of the positions held by two of the powerful wings of the conservative movement—free marketeers and evangelical Christians—he has provoked a fury among members of the third GOP wing, the neoconservatives, who for all practical purposes dominate the party’s foreign policy thinking.