Our Picks

Amongst the myriad of reasons for the Obama-Clinton-CIA campaign about alleged Russian hacking during the US election, a key one was to bluff Donald Trump into condemning Russia.

Whilst stories of Russian interference in the US Presidential election have dominated the US and British media for months despite being wholly unsupported by factual evidence, factual evidence of Israeli interference in British politics is going largely unreported.

Russia, together with much of the Orthodox world, celebrates Christmas today 7th January 2017.
This is not due to theological difference.  The Russian Orthodox Church retains the Julian Calendar, and by its reckoning today is 25th December 2016 ie. Christmas Day.  Russia continued to use the Julian Calendar until February 1918, when the new Bolshevik government switched to West’s Gregorian Calendar, which is why the “October Revolution” which brought the  Bolsheviks to power actually took place – according to the West’s calendar and to Russia’s present calendar – in November.

The French commentator Natalie Nougayrède has written an extraordinary piece in The Guardian, which hints that even if Donald Trump lifts US sanctions on Russia…
Angela Merkel will try to keep EU sanctions in place:

A week ago, following release of Grizzly Steppe, the FBI/Homeland Security report supposedly substantiating the US intelligence community’s report that Russian intelligence was behind the hacking of the DNC and of Podesta, I said that the Russian hacking scandal is starting more and more to resemble the Iraq WMD debacle, with one dodgy dossier succeeding another.

Whilst the US mainstream media continues to focus on the esoteric question of whether Vladimir Putin was behind the Clinton leaks, many Americans are probably more interested in an appalling incident of racial violence in Chicago.
I should perhaps qualify the above statement since it is not clear to me how many Americans actually know of this incident (in Britain the media is barely reporting it).  The facts nonetheless seem clear enough if only because the individuals involved posted a video of what they did onto Facebook.

Whilst Russia’s carrier Admiral Kuznetsov is returning home following her operational use in the conflict in Syria, her sister ship the Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning (formerly the Varyag) is on her first cruise.
The Chinese Defence Ministry has described the purpose of Liaoning’s cruise as “scientific research, experiment and training.”  In other words it is primarily a training exercise intended to familiarise the Chinese with naval carrier operations in preparation for the much bigger Chinese built carriers which are coming.

Following the Syrian army’s victory in Aleppo the Russian Defence Ministry has confirmed that the Russian fleet sent to the eastern Mediterranean earlier in the autumn, including the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov and the nuclear powered missile battlecruiser Pyotr Veliky, are being withdrawn to Russia.
This was always the plan.  There was never any suggestion that the deployment was intended to be anything other than a temporary one.

The Senate hearings into the Russian hacking scandal that took place on Thursday 5th January 2017 came across to me as something of a damp squib.
Director James Clapper provided no actual evidence to support the allegation that Russia was responsible for the Clinton leaks, and refused to go along with Senator McCain’s wildly over-the-top claim that Russia’s alleged interference in the election was an “act of war”.

There are already signs that Donald Trump is transforming the Republican Party from a neo-con body into one more at ease with traditional conservatism.
One of the clearest barometers of such trends is Fox News, the perennial mouth piece of the Republican Party, and one time hawkish neo-con bullhorn.
But things seem to be slowly changing.