Politics

Authored by Ghassan Kadi via The Saker blog,

Mohamed Bin Salman’s (MBS) royal Saudi coup is still in the making and its stories of mystery and intrigue are unfolding.

When he was named special counsel in May, Robert S. Mueller III was hailed as the ideal lawman - deeply experienced, strait-laced and nonpartisan - to investigate whether President Trump’s campaign had helped with Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

Nearly two weeks after the Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, approved legislation allowing authorities to designate US-backed media organizations as foreign agents, Russian President Vladimir Putin has officially signed the bill into law.

The law allows Moscow to label foreign media outlets as “foreign agents” in response to Washington’s decision to force Russia Today, a media organization funded by the Russian government that has been operating in the US since 2005, to register as a foreign agent.

As we noted last week, hypocrisy may be the only consistent guiding principle of US foreign policy.

The Rex Tillerson State Department will pump $700,000 into Hungarian media to remove Viktor Orban.

TheDuran's Alex Christoforou writes:

When another nation state uses media to communicate it’s point of view, its flagged as a foreign agent, a “bad actor”, and often declared as an “act of war (i.e. RT).

 

Just after Putin hosted trilateral talks on Syria and the Middle East in Sochi involving Russia, Iran, and Turkey, President Trump spent part of his Friday after Thanksgiving on the phone with Turkey's Erdogan. While the two discussed Syria and other regional issues, it appears they broached the delicate and contentious topic of US support to Syrian Kurdish fighters (namely, the Kurdish YPG, which forms the core of the Syrian Democratic Forces).