Russia

First, the US blamed Russian hackers for Hillary Clinton's unexpected loss, a narrative which continues to reverberate with the relentless crusade by both the WaPo and NYT against "fake news." then Germany preemptively blamed Russia for a potential loss by Angela Merkel in the upcoming elections: as we reported last night, Germany's domestic intelligence agency is reporting a "striking increase" in Russian propaganda and disinformation campaigns aimed at destabilizing German society, and targeted cyber attacks against political parties.

Now, it's the UK's turn.

In a massive (in a literal sense, printing at 25 pages and over 8,000 words as there is little new information revealed in the piece itself) expose issued by the NYT tited "The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S." and meant to piggyback on the WaPo's recent reporting and solidify the left-leaning media's case that Hillary lost the election, the New York Times try to summarize all the recent publicly available information on alleged Russian hackings of everything from the DNC server to the Podesta email.

Submitted by Wayne Madsen via Strategic-Culture.org,

President Obama has been forced to admit that Russia did not hack the U.S. elections as is being widely reported in the mainstream media.  During an interview with the Daily Show’s Trevor Noah, Barack Obama denounced the conspiracy theory that Russians tampered with the American voting process. “We were frankly more concerned in the run up to the election to the possibilities of vote tampering, which we did not see evidence of,” he admitted.

The Syrian war is on the verge of the biggest shift in the balance of power since 2011, with the Assad regime - with support from Russian forces - having retaken Aleppo. And, as Russia's UN envoy Vitaly Churkin notes, an arrangement has been reached for militants to leave the besieged areas of eastern Aleppo “within hours”, confirming earlier media reports that Assad is about to have full reign of the hotly contested city - a symbolic center of the anti-Assad insurgency.