Russia

In September, Russia will conduct its Zapad 2017 military exercise, the largest since the end of the Cold War, and one which is already sending shivers down the spine of NATO, which not only has "serious doubts Moscow is revealing the true extent of its military exercises", but because the last time such a major training exercise took place was just before the Crimea "annexation." One country, however, isn't taking chances: Russia's northern neighbor Finland, which as the WSJ reports, is "going underground."

Coming at a "sensitive" moment for US-Russian hacking diplomatic relations, on Friday Foreign Policy reported that emails belonging to a senior US State Department intelligence official involved in Russian affairs have been leaked by a hacker known as "Johnnie Walker." The official, whose work is focused on Russian domestic affairs and who was described to FT as “probably the top intelligence guy in the entire U.S.

Stephen Lendman sums up the latest fake news

The Non-Issue of Trump Jr.’s Emails

by Stephen Lendman (stephenlendman.org – Home – Stephen Lendman)

Anything about Russia, Trump, his family and team consistently is overblown, misrepresented and lied about by what he justifiably calls the “dishonest media.” Indeed!!

Trump Jr.’s meeting and email correspondence with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya amounted to much ado about nothing.

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

The abiding enigma of this tormented era remains: why has the thinking class of America abandoned thinking?

The answer is: it’s the reaction to their own failure.

Failure to do what? To produce the utopia that Gnostic liberalism promised - a perfect world based on altering human nature.

Repeating what Russian diplomats said informally at the start of the week, the Russian foreign ministry said on Friday that "too many American spies operated in Moscow" under diplomatic cover and warned it might expel some of them to retaliate against Washington's December 2016 expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats.