Politics

US military contractor Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) and Israeli arms company Elbit Systems have won a £500-million contract to provide aircraft training for the UK military. RT reports: The Affinity venture, in which the two are partners, will provide fixed wing training for sections of the UK Armed Forces concerned with aviation. Affinity’s component is part of a larger deal led by Ascent Flight training and worth £1.1 billion. Ascent is itself a fifty-fifty venture between international arms firms Babcock and Lockheed Martin.

The British woman who took her 18-month old son to Syria, has been sentenced to six years in prison for joining ISIS. After telling her family she was going on holiday to Turkey in October 2014,  26 year old Tareena Shakil traveled to the terrorist stronghold of Raqqa in Syria. Her father claims that his daughter’s conviction is a ‘fix up’ by officials RT reports: While in Syria, Shakil posted pictures of her toddler next to an AK-47, as well as wearing a balaclava emblazoned with IS imagery.

Matt Purple looks ahead to the rest of the February contests and concludes that Trump is still the favorite to win:

Trump leads in New Hampshire, the moderate state. He leads in South Carolina, the establishment state. He leads in Nevada, the libertarian state. His margins in those places are not narrow.

Surviving Iowa in a dead heat with Sen. Bernie Sanders, ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton now hopes her establishment-backed campaign will grind down her opposition and pave the way for her presidential nomination. But many Democrats remain leery of her hawkish foreign policy, writes Marjorie Cohn. By Marjorie Cohn Hillary Clinton likes to extol her foreign policy credentials, particularly…

Late last month, we noted that Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz was set to cut social benefits for refugees who failed to attend “special integration training courses.”

Austria, like Germany and multiple other countries in the Schengen zone, is struggling to cope with the influx of asylum seekers fleeing the war-torn Mid-East. Of particular concern is the “integration” process whereby those hailing from “different cultures” are having a decidedly difficult time blending into polite Western society.