Russia

It has been over a month since Russia and the US engaged in political tit-for-tat escalations, but that is about to change: after a recent crackdown by the U.S. government, which ordered state broadcaster RT to register as a foreign agent following accusations it interfered in last year’s presidential elections, and which saw Twitter ban all RT-sourced advertising (despite actively seeking RT's business beforehand) Russia said on Thursday it would retaliate next week against the American media, Bloomberg reports.

Authored by Steve Keen via RT.com,

I was delighted to find myself in the Top Ten (alright; top 15) of the European Values list of 2,326 “Useful Idiots” appearing regularly on RT shows, and thus legitimizing Vladimir Putin’s attempt to destroy Western civilization as we know it.

Why delighted? Because it completes the set of conspiracies to which I can now be accused of belonging. They include:

Congress is using a decades-old piece of legislation to force Russia Today to register as a foreign agent in the US, adding that if the site doesn’t comply with the order by Monday, the DOJ could move to shutter its operations and arrest its top executive, RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan.

Russia Today revealed Thursday that the Department of Justice has given the site until next week to comply with its new interpretation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). RT has been operating in the US since 2005.

As we've said before, US accusations that countries like China and Russia run sophisticated hacking operations designed to infiltrate sensitive US networks are often hypocritical. After all, we do the exact same thing.

Today, the Daily Beast reported on newly unsealed documents that show the FBI blindly hacked into computers in Russia, China and Iran during a wide ranging investigation that lead to the bust of a global child pornography operation and the liberation of sexual abuse victims.

As the Daily Beast explains...

In what is sure to stir up a media storm of over analysis, the Kremlin has commented that there is a strong possibility that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will meet on the sidelines of the upcoming international summit in Vietnam.