Politics

Putin has decided not to expel US diplomats in reprisal for Washington’s recent sanctions. The Russian president said he would not be expelling US diplomats in a tit-for-tat response to the White House’s decision to send home Russian officials accused of spying. “The new unfriendly measures by the US administration are regarded as provocative, designed to further undermine relations,” Putin said in a statement on the Kremlin website. “We will not create problems for U.S. diplomats. We will not expel anybody,” Putin added in the statement on Friday.

We've previously documented that the hacking evidence against Russia is extremely weak, and the new report on Russian hacking doesn't say much.

Indeed - if Russia hacked the Democratic party emails (from the DNC and top Clinton aide John Podesta) - the NSA would have all of the records showing exactly who did it.

We asked Bill Binney what he thought of the new report.

Just hours after President Obama unveiled his sanctions against Russia for "meddling in the US election," one of the largest alternative aggregators, Drudge Report, suffered the "biggest DDOS attack since the site's inception" according to founder Matt Drudge, who noted "suspicious routing and timing" of the attack.

Is the US government attacking DRUDGE REPORT?

Biggest DDoS since site's inception. VERY suspicious routing [and timing].

Donald Trump’s senior aide Kellyanne Conway has denounced Barack Obama’s decision to impose harsh economic sanctions against Russia. Conway described the sanctions as “unprecedented” and that they may have been aimed at restricting Trump’s policy toward Russia, saying that Obama was trying to “box-in” his successor by issuing the sanctions with just weeks before leaving his presidency.

Iran has said that Israel will pay dearly for continuing with the construction of settlements on Palestinian land. Ongoing Israeli settlement construction will spark a war that will lead to the Jewish state’s “complete destruction,” an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) spokesman said on Thursday.