Today, the South Korean and US navies on Monday kicked off massive combined drills off the coast of the peninsula amid heightened tensions, a train exercise which North Korea has warned may prompt another ballistic missile launch, potentially to coincide with the launch of the Chinese 19th Party Congress on October 18. The two allies plan to continue the Maritime Counter Special Operations Exercise (MCSOFEX) through Friday in the East Sea and the Yellow Sea.As reported over the weekend, the...

President Trump has been notoriously inconsistent in his foreign policy. He campaigned on and won the presidency with promises to repair relations with Russia, pull out of no-win wars like Afghanistan, and end the failed US policy of nation-building overseas. Once in office he pursued policies exactly the opposite of what he campaigned on. Unfortunately Iran is one of the few areas where the president has been very consistent. And consistently wrong.In the president’s speech last week he...

President Donald Trump has put the United States on the course for war with Iran. That was clearly his objective last Friday when he refused to certify the international nuclear accord with Iran and proclaimed heavy sanctions against Tehran’s powerful paramilitary Revolutionary Guards Corps.Trump’s move was also a clever ploy to deflect blame for abrogating the key 2015 Iran nuclear treaty that the US signed with Iran, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China and the European Union.Accusing...

Even as the Trump administration disintegrates – with the President publicly quarrelling with his Secretary of State, and his Chief of Staff forced to deny he is about to resign – the scandal which more than anything else has defined this Presidency has disintegrated into total lunacy.Consider these facts:1) The Mueller investigationJust a few weeks ago the media was full of reports of how Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation was “closing in” on the President and his campaign team. The...

Multiple neurologists and experts have told The Guardian that the mysterious "sonic attacks" upon US diplomats in Cuba are likely just a case of mass hysteria. The extensive Guardian report is based on research and interviews with top neurologists and medical experts explaining that the likeliest explanation for the strange and inexplicable symptoms reported by US embassy staff in Cuba which have led to a breakdown in relations between the two countries has nothing to do with some kind of...

With the memory of the saber-rattling prelude to the US’ 2003 invasion of Iraq largely faded, many of that war’s biggest proponents have recently found themselves uniting behind a new cause – the dissolution of the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). In recent weeks, their calls for destroying the deal have grown — especially as President Donald Trump, who has long criticized the deal, seems determined to make a decision on deal’s ultimate fate...

The remark Wednesday by the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister and Presidential envoy for the Middle East Mikhail Bogdanov offering Moscow’s mediation for a rapprochement between Riyadh and Tehran comes within the week of the Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz’s talks with President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. Bogdanov was on a visit to Rabat and probably had the Middle East audience in view. He knew most certainly that the weekend is approaching when the US President Donald Trump is expected to...

Yesterday we identified a permanent fiscal crisis as one of the quadruple witching forces arising in October 2017 which will shatter the global financial bubble. Today the Donald is on the cusp of making the crisis dramatically worse by decertifying the Iranian nuke deal, thereby reinforcing another false narrative that enables the $1 trillion Warfare State to continue bleeding the nation's fiscal solvency.In a word, the whole notion that Iran is a national security threat and state sponsor of...

Somehow everything keeps coming back around to Russia. In one of its recent initiatives, the Justice Department (DOJ) appears to be attacking the First Amendment as part of the apparent bipartisan program to make Vladimir Putin the fall guy for everything that goes wrong in Washington. In the past month, the DOJ has revealed that the FBI is investigating Russian owned news outlets Sputnik News and RT International and has sent letters to the latter demanding that one of its business affiliates...

“Fascists are divided into two categories: the fascists and the anti-fascists.” – Ennio Flaiano, Italian writer and co-author of Federico Fellini’s greatest film scripts. In recent weeks, a totally disoriented left has been widely exhorted to unify around a masked vanguard calling itself Antifa, for anti-fascist. Hooded and dressed in black, Antifa is essentially a variation of the Black Bloc, familiar for introducing violence into peaceful demonstrations in many countries. Imported from...

President Trump and the congressional Republican leadership recently unveiled a tax reform “framework.” The framework has a number of provisions that will lower taxes on middle-class Americans. For example, the framework doubles the standard deduction and increases the child care tax credit. It also eliminates the alternative minimum tax (AMT). Created in the 1960s, the AMT was designed to ensure the “wealthy” did not use “loopholes” to “get out of” paying taxes. Today the AMT is mostly a...

On this day 16 years ago, less than one month after 9/11, President George W. Bush delivered a televised address from the White House announcing the beginning of the Afghanistan War.“On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against al Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan,” he said.What Bush did not say was the fact that the War in Afghanistan would become the longest war in United States history. Thousands of American...

Officials familiar with the situation say that President Trump is intending to “decertify” the P5+1 nuclear deal with Iran ahead of the October 15 deadline. With no evidence Iran is violating the deal in any way, he is going to instead claim it is just “not in the national interest of the United States” to honor the deal’s terms.This has much the same effect as falsely claiming Iran to be in violation, as it would put the nuclear deal up for a vote in Congress. Though Congress has long...

The Syrian Army was on its way across the Euphrates river to liberate the oil- and gas-fields east of Deir Ezzor city. The US countered the move. It sent a small forces of Arab tribal mercenaries who were earlier allied with the Islamic State (ISIS). These proxy forces came from a northern direction and moved through Islamic State held areas without fighting and casualties up to the walls of Deir Ezzor city.The Syrian army was about to win the race when it started to cross the Euphrates. But...

For years, civil libertarians have warned that Great Britain has been in a free fall from the criminalization of speech to the expansion of the surveillance state. Now the government is pursuing a law that would make the repeated viewing of extremist Internet sites a crime punishable to up to 15 years in prison. It appears that the government is not satiated by their ever-expanding criminalization of speech. They now want to criminalize even viewing sites on the Internet. As always, officials...