Politics

President Putin made an unusual and urgent call to King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud on Wednesday after the leader of Saudi Arabia refused to speak to President Obama on the upcoming Syrian ceasefire later this week – a situation which risked a World War if left unresolved. The Saudi king spoke to Putin about the nature of the Russian-US ceasefire agreement in Syria, before agreeing to cooperate with it. “The king of Saudi Arabia welcomed the reached agreements and expressed readiness to cooperate with Russia for their implementation,” The Kremlin reports.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that Turkey has a right to carry out military operations in any country hosting terrorists, even terrorists that Turkey actively supports.  “Turkey has every right to conduct operations in Syria and the places where terror organizations are nested with regards to the struggle against the threats that Turkey faces,” Erdogan told the Hurriyet newspaper.

Authored by Robert Reich,

Step back from the campaign fray for just a moment and consider the enormity of what’s already occurred.

A 74-year-old Jew from Vermont who describes himself as a democratic socialist, who wasn’t even a Democrat until recently, has come within a whisker of beating Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucus, routed her in the New Hampshire primary, and garnered over 47 percent of the caucus-goers in Nevada, of all places.

French special forces and intelligence commandos are engaged in covert operations against ISIS militants in Libya in conjunction with the United States and Britain, French media reported on Wednesday. According to a report in French newspaper Le Monde, President Francois Hollande authorised “unofficial military action” in the North African country RT reports: “The last thing to do would be to intervene in Libya. We must avoid any overt military engagement, but act discreetly,” a senior military source told Le Monde.

Donald Trump says he’s “tough on immigration,” and maybe he is.

But not like Hungarian PM Viktor Orban.

Last September, when things began to get out of hand on the Balkan route north to Germany, Orban decided to build a 100 mile long, 12-foot high razor wire migrant-be-gone fence on his country’s border with Serbia. Some refugees didn’t like that and decided to test Orban’s resolve. Here’s what happened next:

And here’s a chart which shows the rather dramatic effect Orban’s crackdown had on migrant flows into Hungary: