Update: The meeting seemed more cordial than many had hoped for:
#BREAKING: @realDonaldTrump speaks with President Putin pic.twitter.com/tr0hV1XQO1
— WSVN 7 News (@wsvn) July 7, 2017
Putin’s Assessment of Trump at the G-20 Will Determine Our Future
Paul Craig Roberts
The backdrops to the Putin/Trump meeting are the aspirations of Israel and the neoconservatives. It is these aspirations that drive US foreign policy.
Speaking in an interview with France 24, in which Turkish president Recep Erdogan lashed out at Germany for not allowing him to address the Turkish community there and preventing him from bringing his bodyguards to the upcoming G20 meeting in Hamburg, Erdogan warned that Turkey is ready to intervene militarily in north Syria to repel Syrian Kurdish forces there, forces which recall are armed and supported by the US but are seen as a terrorist organisation by Turkey.
Authored by Whitney Webb via TheAntiMedia.org,
Crucial to the Western narrative of the Syrian conflict is the assertion that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is a brutal dictator who has taken to killing his own people over the course of Syria’s six-year-long conflict. This allegation has been the crux of the “humanitarian” justification for foreign military intervention in Syria that would seek to depose Assad’s government, a justification frequently used by the U.S. and its allies prior to an invasion or the toppling of an extant regime.
If there was any confusion whether in addition to Moscow, Beijing was also behind Assad, today all doubts were laid to rest when both Russia and China called on all involved parties "to support the efforts of the OPCW and the United Nations in investigating the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria," according to a joint statement by Russian and Chinese leaders on the current international situation posted on Kremlin website on Tuesday, following a meeting between Putin and China's president Xi Jinping.