An analysis of cartridges used by Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria shows that their newest ammunition is of American origin. China and the Soviet Union were identified as the biggest sources of munitions, but with bullets made 25 years ago. The Conflict Armament Research (CAR) group analyzed the origin of some 1,700 small-caliber cartridges collected from areas in Syria and Iran where [...]

The UK's top law enforcement officer says Britons must be prepared to sacrifice their freedoms online if they want to be protected from terrorists and cyber criminals. This includes giving authorities access to private email and social media contents. Speaking to The Guardian, the director general of the National Crime Agency (NCA), Keith Bristow, warned that the UK’s biggest threats are beco [...]

The US goal in the Ukrainian conflict is to put up a dividing line between NATO states and Russia and create the Transatlantic political, economic and military community, John Laughland of the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation in Paris told RT. US Vice President Joe Biden in his speech to Harvard University's Institute of Politics last week admitted that the US government pushed the EU to [...]

Three class-action lawsuits filed Friday claim that agribusiness power Syngenta is to blame for depressed corn exports to China since the seed company released a genetically-engineered variant of the crop before it was approved by Beijing. At issue is Syngenta’s 2009 release and distribution of its MIR162 genetically-modified corn known as Agrisure Viptera, which is engineered to fend off cer [...]

Russia has 1,643 nuclear missiles ready to launch – one more than the US – according to an official State Department report. Both countries have been upgrading their active nuclear arsenals since the outbreak of the Ukrainian conflict. The US report is based on official figures exchanged between the two countries as part of the New START disarmament treaty, and includes missiles deployed be [...]

After six years, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has nearly weathered his chilly relationship with President Obama and can expect to coast through the next two years ignoring Obama’s appeals. But Obama is not the first U.S. president to be played by Israel, as Morgan Strong wrote in 2010. At the end of a news conference on April 13, 2010, President Barack Obama made the seemingly obvious poi [...]

US Vice President Joe Biden has made the latest in a series of chastening apologies, after the United Arab Emirates expressed “astonishment” at his Thursday remarks. Biden called US allies “the biggest problem” in fighting terrorism in the Middle East. Biden called Abu Dhabi's Crown Prince and Deputy Defense Minister Mohammed bin Zayed on Sunday to reaffirm the allies’ shared perspect [...]

ISIS militants trained by US Special Forces have been used as a lever to create disorder and organize a Sharia state along the lines of an Islamic caliphate to the advantage of the US military, geopolitical analyst William Engdahl told RT. The US military has, in one way or another, been involved in the Middle East region for over a decade. Why has the violence lasted so long? [...]

For several years, Official Washington blinded itself to the growing radicalism of the Syrian opposition, all the better to portray the Assad regime as the “bad guys” and the rebels as the “good guys.” Now, everyone is pointing fingers about the ISIS “surprise,” as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar explains. The recent burst of recriminations about what the U.S. intelligence community d [...]

Vice President Joe Biden, by blaming Washington's allies for the spread of IS in Iraq and Syria, attempted to distance the US from the mess that is emerging in the Middle East, former MI5 agent Annie Machon told RT. Addressing students at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University, Joe Biden accused Turkey and the Gulf States of being unscrupulous in their [...]

Washington will not be the one to decide Sweden’s policies, Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström said after the US criticized Stockholm’s plans to officially recognize Palestine as a sovereign state. “It's not the US that decides our politics,” Wallström said, adding that the new Swedish authorities expected to “get criticism” after their announcement on Palestinian statehood [...]

At the Autumn Meeting of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly (PA), Russian official Sergey Naryshkin made the Ukrainian crisis a top European security issue, while speaking at a conference on new security challenges in the region. At a meeting on "New Security Challenges: The Role of Parliaments" on Friday, Naryshkin, the Head of the Lower House of Russian Parliament, who leads the Moscow delegatio [...]

Russia's Space Forces are to modernize and again use an old radar station in Sevastopol, Crimea, part of Russia's missile attack warning system until 2009. The station to be fully operational and providing data to the Russian military in 2016, Space Forces commander Lt. Gen. Aleksandr Golovko announced on Saturday. [...]

Anti-war activists will descend on London on Saturday to protest against British airstrikes on Islamic State (IS, ISIS/ISIL) positions in Iraq. Groups including the Stop the War Coalition plan to march through London, past Downing Street, to voice their opposition to the UK’s military intervention, which began after winning parliamentary approval last week. [...]

Prime Minister David Cameron says members of the so-called Islamic State (IS) responsible for the murder of British hostage Alan Henning "will be hunted down and face justice." The PM's warning comes as militants threatened to murder a fifth hostage. On Saturday Cameron met with security chiefs and the Foreign Office at his official country residence Chequers to discuss the murder of Henning, D [...]

Intelligence service BND failed to protect the private data of German citizens as it handed over internet data collected at a Frankfurt traffic hub to the US, German media report citing secret documents. The documents cited by VDR and EDR television and the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, which broke the news together, were obtained from the federal government during an ongoing parliamentary in [...]

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed he would wash his hands of Joe Biden if reports that the US vice president blamed Turkey in part for the rise of the so-called Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) were true. On Thursday, Biden said his “old friend” Erdogan had admitted to making a mistake in allowing foreign fighters to cross the Turkish border into Syria. [...]

For the past three years, Official Washington has viewed the Syrian civil war as “white-hatted” rebels against “black-hatted” President Assad, but finally some of the “gray-hatted” reality is breaking through, though perhaps too late, Robert Parry reports. By Robert Parry In late summer 2013, Official Washington was rushing to the judgment that the “evil” Syrian President Bas [...]

Armenia has decided to hang its hat with its former Soviet ally Russia instead of joining a European free-trade agreement, President Serzh Sarksyan announced after meeting with Vladimir Putin. Armenia said it would join Russia in the Customs Union, as well as engage in the Eurasian integration process instead of negotiating a free trade agreement with the EU. [...]

Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a law ratifying a historic treaty, committing Russia to an economic union with Belarus and Kazakhstan. The Eurasian Economic Union will come into effect in January 2015. Putin’s signature in the document puts the final dot in Russia’s ratification of the union which will be in place on January 1, 2015, as the other union states are expected to com [...]

America's leadership had to embarrass Europe to impose economic hits on Russia over the crisis in Ukraine - even though the EU was opposed to such a motion, US Vice President Joe Biden revealed during a speech at Harvard. “We’ve given Putin a simple choice: Respect Ukraine’s sovereignty or face increasing consequences,” Biden told a gathering at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at Harvard [...]

Whenever the public right to know comes under attack, a heavy responsibility falls on the journalist. When I was 17, my teacher told the class this salient information. Did the Western mainstream media learn it too or have they simply forgotten it? “News is what someone wants to stop (you) from printing; all the rest is ads.”- William Randolph Hearst. [...]