War

Early Friday, militants armed with guns and explosives stormed a mosque in Egypt’s troubled northern Sinai Peninsula on Friday, killing at least 235 people and wounding at least 120 others, according to Bloomberg, in what appears to be the deadliest mass killing in Egypt since the 2013 attack in Rabaa al-Adawiya, where soldiers loyal to present-day leader Abdel Fattah el-Sisi murdered as many as 900 Islamists who had gathered in the square for a nonviolent sit-in.

Washington's past decade of Syria policy has been driven by fears of the so-called "Shia crescent" or Iranian land bridge which would conceivably connect Tehran with the Mediterranean in a continuous arch of influence. With events rapidly unfolding in Iraq and Syria, foremost among them the defeat of ISIS and the connection of Syrian and Iraqi national forces at the shared border, that land bridge has now been established for the first time in recent history. 

2017 has seen the biggest drop in American firearms sales in history.

After 8 years of almost incessant rises in NICS Firearms Checks (a proxy for 'legal' arms sales) under President Obama...

source: NICS

2017 has seen a considerable drop (year-to-date) - the biggest on NICS records...

source: NICS

Anti-slavery protests continued across various world capitals this week, especially in countries across Africa, after earlier protests in France got violent when police used tear gas and other riot control tactics on a crowed of more than one thousand outside of the Libyan embassy in Paris. The protests are in response to last week's widespread reports of slave markets operating in various cities across Libya, and look to continue as according to Reuters a major rally is set to take place in London later this week. 

Be it a sudden surge in the effectiveness of Russia's international espionage and cyber warfare operations or a mere figment of the imaginations of a frightening group of politicians in the West who fear they're slowly losing control over the masses in their respective countries, one thing is certain, Russia is increasingly being blamed for some very serious "meddling" in foreign affairs.