Politics

The White House has backtracked on a report it is rolling back sanctions on Russia's Federal Security Service, the successor agency to the KGB,  after the Treasury Department announced an amendment to put measures in place by former President Obama in response to Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The FSB was one of several entities sanctioned by Obama in December related to Russian hacking of Democratic political organizations and operatives. The FSB must also approve certain technology imports to Russia per domestic law.

UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd warns MPs that President Trump’s temporary travel ban on Muslims from seven countries and the suspension of refugee arrivals to the U.S. is a potential “propaganda opportunity” for ISIS. “The sources of terrorism are not to be found in the sources where the president is necessarily looking for them,” Rudd told a Committee at the House of Commons in Parliament. The Home Secretary believes that Donald Trump’s executive order is wrong, divisive and a potential recruiting tool for the Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS/ISIL/Daesh).

The sore losers of the Left, after refusing to attend Trump's inauguration, have apparently decided to double down on their childish behavior by plotting a number of protests at Trump's upcoming address to Congress.  According to The Hill, House Democrats are rallying behind a plan to make the newly-elected President's first address to Congress as uncomfortable as possible by inviting guests they say will be harmed by his policies, including ethnic minorities, LGBT people, undocumented immigrants and the disabled.

One of the more troubling geopolitical stories in the past week has been the renewed flaring of fighting in Eastern Ukraine, which culminated yesterday with Kiev accusing Moscow of shooting at its military transport airplane while flying over the Black Sea, an allegation Moscow denied. To some, this has been a test by Putin to gauge US resolve in condemning what the western media is quick to dub Russian provocations; to others this is merely the sad continuation of events unleashed with the violent presidential coup in Ukraine two years ago.

With the US officially warning Iran twice over the past 24 hours in the harshest possible terms yet, when first national security advisor Michael Flynn, and then this morning Trump himself, said Iran has been "put on notice" for "destabilizing activity" after it fired a ballistic missile in defiance of UN resolutions, on Thursday a top adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was quoted by Reuters as saying the country would not yield to "useless" U.S. threats from "an inexperienced person" over its ballistic missile program.