Rex Tillerson

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson stands before laying a wreath at the mausoleum of Turkey’s founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, in Ankara, Turkey, Thursday, March 30, 2017. (AP/Lefteris Pitarakis)
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s visit to Turkey has uncovered a dramatic shift in US policy toward Syria, as Tillerson declared in his visit with Turkey’s Foreign Minister that the future of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad should be left up to the Syrian people.

Whenever one doesn’t respect the right of sovereign states to exist, it does more than violate the letter and principles of international law. It opens up the floodgates to further crises. These crises often come back to bite the very countries who initially engaged in illegal interventions into sovereign states.

Hours after US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said during a visit to Turkey that the fate of Syrian President Assad should be decided by the Syrian people – reversing the Obama administration’s demand that Assad must go as part of any Syrian peace settlement – Nikki Haley, the US’s ambassador to the UN, has confirmed that there has indeed been a change in US policy, and that the US is indeed no longer ‘focused’ on getting President Assad to go.

(COMMONDREAMS) Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Wednesday lifted the government’s human rights restrictions on arms sales to Bahrain, in a move that Amnesty International called “galling” and “a dangerous signal.”

An offensive launched two weeks ago by Al-Qaeda in the northern areas of Syria’s Hama province appears to be unravelling, with Jihadi forces in the area coming under heavy bombing by the Russian air force and forced onto the retreat by a counter-attack launched by the Syrian army.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson may have signalled a radical shift in US policy, when he appeared to say at a press conference in Turkey that the issue of Syrian President Assad’s future was one for the Syrian people to decide.
Tillerson’s exact words are reported to have been

I think the … longer term status of President Assad will be decided by the Syrian people

If there was a Nobel Prize for hypocrisy, Turkey Foreign Minister Mevut Cavusoglu just won it. Speaking along side American Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in Ankara, Cavusoglu  said,

“It is not good or realistic to work with a terrorist group while fighting another terrorist group”.

Exxon Mobil’s Billings Refinery in Billings, Mont. (AP/Matthew Brown)
When President Donald J. Trump announced Tuesday that he was walking back on a key plank of the U.S. plan to live up to the Paris Climate Agreement, many were angry but few were surprised.

Fake news is many things. It can be lies, half-truths, deceptions and perhaps most sinister of all, stylised deceptions.
But what many do not pay close attention to is fake news by omission. When there are important global stories that are being ignored or supressed, this is as bad or worse than the more traditional style of fake news.
With this in mind, here are five stories that the mainstream media has ignored in recent days.
1. The Meaning of Mosul 

Exclusive: The murders of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi – after they surrendered their WMD – taught North Korea’s Kim Jong-un not to give up his, setting the stage for a dangerous crisis, explains Jonathan Marshall. By Jonathan Marshall When…Read more →