Russia

Back in September, we noted that the US was set to send 20 new nuclear bombs to Germany each of which has four times the destructive power of the explosive dropped on Hiroshima.

“[These] new attack options against Russia” constitute “a conscious provocation of [Germany’s] Russian neighbors,” one member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats warned. Sergei Lavrov’s de facto number-two, Maria Zakharova said the move represented an “infringement of Articles 1 and 2 of the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.” 

The fight to check the spread of Islamic State in Afghanistan is making for some strange bedfellows. 

From the time Russia began airstrikes in Syria on September 30, the Ministry of Defense has been a serial producer of videos depicting Moscow’s air campaign against anti-Assad elements. 

Whether or not the footage shows what The Kremlin says it does is probably debatable. That is, there’s no way for the public to distinguish between an ISIS training camp and an FSA position in the often grainy clips the MoD posts on YouTube, but one thing is for sure: Russia is conducting a lot of airstrikes in the skies above Syria. 

Russia’s vaunted S-300 and S-400 missile systems have been in the news quite a bit of late. 

Last month, Moscow and Tehran officially revived a long stalled contract worth some $800 million that will see a handful of S-300s delivered to Tehran over the next several months. The deal was initially reached in 2007 but was put on hold in 2010 amid the international sanctions on Iran. Putin lifted the ban earlier this year, citing progress on the Iran nuclear deal. 

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

Donald Trump, judging by polls as of December 21, 2015, is the most likely candidate to be the next president of the US.

Trump is popular not so much for his stance on issues as for the fact that he is not another Washington politican, and he is respected for not backing down and apologizing when he makes strong statements for which he is criticized. What people see in Trump is strength and leadership. This is what is unusual about a political candidate, and it is this strength to which voters are responding.