Russia

Last summer, when the Syrian conflict was near its peak under the Obama administration, China unexpectedly warned it was ready to enter the proxy war when in a stunning announcement, Xinhua reported that Beijing was prepared to side with Syria - and Russia - and against the US-led alliance, and that Xi and Assad had agreed that the Chinese military will have closer ties with Syria and provide humanitarian aid to the civil war torn nation.

Just a few days after the young French president made headlines for his white-knuckled, "not innocent" handshake with Donald Trump, Russian president Vladimir Putin was prepared for his first meeting with Emanuel Macron, with the result captured on the following clip.

TODAY |

Macron - Putin handshake lasted 7 second pic.twitter.com/7M82845MHz

— Vocal Europe (@thevocaleurope) May 29, 2017

Iran signed an agreement with Russia under which it has broken free from the petrodollar, and will "sell", or rather barter crude oil to Russia in exchange for products. The announcement was made by Iran’s Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh, as reported by Russia’s RIA and TASS news agencies.

Authored by David Swanson via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Government lies are common when seducing a population to support a war, but the Russian “hacking” claims are unusual in that U.S. officials supply no evidence while the “fact” is just assumed,

In the first segment of Friday night's "Trump bombshell" report published almost at the same time by Reuters and the WSJ, anonymous sources reported that Trump is preparing a "war room" upon his Saturday return from Europe, to "combat negative reports and mounting questions about communication between Russia." We did point out some discrepancies: on one hand, Reuters said that Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner (who subsequently WaPo reported was trying to set up "backchannels" with Russians in the second Friday night long-weekend bombshell) were coordinating the "war room" and the White House'