Politics

Russia has accused Turkey of breaching the Open Skies Treaty by refusing to allow Russian surveillance aircraft to fly close to the Turkish border over Syria. “After the arrival of the Russian mission to Turkey and the announcement of the desired itinerary, the Turkish military officials refused to allow the inspection flight citing an order from the Turkish Foreign Ministry,” the head of the Russian Defense Ministry’s National Nuclear Risk Reduction Center, Sergey Ryzhkov, said in a statement.

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

Authored by Eric Zuesse,

America’s military budget is roughly 7.2 times that of Russia ($610 billion compared to $84.5 billion), but even Western news-accounts are saying that the weaponry produced in Russia is superior overall to the weaponry produced in the United States.

President Putin of Russia has met with the former U.S. Secretary of State and National Security advisor Henry Kissinger at his residence outside Moscow. RT reports: The Kremlin said that the two have “long-standing, friendly relations” and that they have used the “opportunity to talk.” The meeting is a continuation of a “friendly dialogue between President Putin and Henry Kissinger, who are bound by a longstanding relationship,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. “They communicate all the time, use the opportunity to talk,” he added.

Iraq probably didn’t need to become any more fractious.

The country is deeply divided along sectarian lines with the Shiite government effectively making up for lost time spent under Saddam by marginalizing Iraq’s Sunni minority in the wake of the US invasion that ousted the Ba’athists.

Complicating matters is the presence of Islamic State (which in its early days recruited from the ranks of Saddam’s conquered security apparatus), who still control the country’s second-largest city as well as several oil fields.