Russia

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

Michael Flynn is in the news again.

Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,

Saudi Arabia and Russia have agreed that OPEC and non-OPEC allies should announce an extension of the cuts at the highly-anticipated meeting in Vienna on November 30, Bloomberg reported on Friday, quoting people involved in the talks.

Authord by Alastair Crooke via The Automatic Earth blog,

Robert Kagan first called attention to the fact that America would need to awake from its ‘dream’ a decade ago in End of Dreams: The Return of History, and would have to manage the rise of ‘other’ powers, (some greater than others), with adroitness, if it were to avoid a bad road-crash as emerging competitors clashed with the waning dominant power.  

Nearly two weeks after the Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, approved legislation allowing authorities to designate US-backed media organizations as foreign agents, Russian President Vladimir Putin has officially signed the bill into law.

The law allows Moscow to label foreign media outlets as “foreign agents” in response to Washington’s decision to force Russia Today, a media organization funded by the Russian government that has been operating in the US since 2005, to register as a foreign agent.

Just after Putin hosted trilateral talks on Syria and the Middle East in Sochi involving Russia, Iran, and Turkey, President Trump spent part of his Friday after Thanksgiving on the phone with Turkey's Erdogan. While the two discussed Syria and other regional issues, it appears they broached the delicate and contentious topic of US support to Syrian Kurdish fighters (namely, the Kurdish YPG, which forms the core of the Syrian Democratic Forces).