A new White House plan to combat climate change and update transportation systems would impose a fee of $10 per barrel of oil to fund $300 billion in spending over the next decade. President Barack Obama is expected to make his case to Congress next week. Promoting a “21st century clean transportation system,” the Obama administration unveiled its transportation budget Thursday, first to [...]

One of the epic miscarriages of justice of our time is unraveling: The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention – the international tribunal that adjudicates and decides whether governments comply with their human rights obligations – has ruled that Julian Assange has been detained unlawfully by Britain and Sweden. [...]

Dwight D. Eisenhower was a five-star general in charge of the Normandy Invasion and a popular two-term President of the United States. Today he would be called a “conspiracy theorist.” “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. [...]

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) released a report titled Rigged Justice: How Weak Enforcement Lets Corporate Offenders Off Easy. The report, the first in an annual series on enforcement, highlights 20 of the most egregious civil and criminal [...]

As the United States begins to warn of the growing threat of Daesh in Libya, political analyst Hafsa Kara speaks to Radio Sputnik’s Loud & Clear about Washington’s role in destabilizing the North African nation – and the personal involvement of Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton. [...]

By carving Kosovo out of Yugoslavia Washington sowed a whirlwind for Europe to reap: Kosovo has turned into a de facto "mafia state," American author Justin Raimondo writes, citing German intelligence agency BND. Libya, Syria, Iraq and Kosovo have become grotesque monuments to Washington's [...]

The Pentagon’s claims that Russia and China are among the top challenges for the US is a justification to continue the flow of taxpayer’s money into major weapon systems and their corporate sponsors, Karen Kwiatkowski, retired US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel told RT. US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter announced Tuesday that the Pentagon will request a $582.7 billion defense budget in o [...]

Is it just coincidence that shortly after Russia begins a successful bombing campaign against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) positions in Syria, US think-tanks suddenly called for American boots on the ground in the Arab Republic? The US military has some of the world’s most advanced surveillance technology, capable of identifying suspected terrorists and eliminating them with state-o [...]

Austrian athlete and daredevil, Felix Baumgartner, known for his super-sonic leap from the stratosphere, has bashed EU politicians for their “idiotic” refugee policies in a lengthy post. He added that Washington is destabilizing Europe “on purpose.” [...]

The United States put pressure on EU countries when it came to extending the anti-Russian sanctions, but as the situation in Europe deteriorates, the US prefers to watch from the sidelines, Austrian newspaper Kurier wrote. Washington strongly insisted on tougher measures against Moscow because it understood that the sanctions wouldn‘t affect it much, the article said. [...]

“One of the greatest stories of the 20th century was that we doubled the life expectancy of adults,” Terry Fulmer, head of the John A. Hartford Foundation, remarked recently. In the last quarter-century, Washington has helped fight this trend. Consider the dark news Health Affairs delivered this month. Mexico saw a “decline in life expectancy from 2005 to 2010 among men nationwide,” mai [...]

A U.S. rendition plane was ready and waiting in Copenhagen in June 2013 to nab National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, a Danish news website reported this week. At the time, Snowden had fled Hong Kong and was stuck at the airport in Moscow. [...]

In what some are calling another example of a two-tiered justice system, the Pentagon said Friday that it would not demote Retired General David Petraeus, who was convicted in 2015 of leaking classified information to his biographer and mistress. [...]

When there's a natural rapport between leaders, relationships are easy. In such an atmosphere, negotiating is a doddle. Of course, when the opposite is the case, the reverse often happens. Small disagreements can explode into furious arguments. [...]

Eighty Swiss banks have agreed to pay the US fines totaling $1.36 billion in order to avoid court prosecution, according to the US Justice Department. After the investigation has been completed all the banks are required to cooperate in related criminal or civil proceedings, said the department. [...]

Robert Gates, a Republican stalwart and former US defence secretary who served under eight presidents, has derided the party’s election candidates for a grasp of national security issues that “would embarrass a middle schooler”. An ex-CIA director who first joined the White House under Richard Nixon, Gates joked that if frontrunner Donald Trump wins the presidency, he would emigrate to Ca [...]

AP is reporting: “Satellite photos obtained by The Associated Press confirm what church leaders and Middle East preservationists had feared: The oldest Christian monastery in Iraq has been reduced to a field of rubble, yet another victim of the Islamic State group’s relentless destruction of heritage sites it considers heretical.” [...]

In order to justify regime change strategies in certain countries, official Washington demonizes their leaders, making them objects of revulsion and ridicule and thus influencing opinions of the American people, a game particularly dangerous when played against the leader of nuclear-armed Russia, according to an American psychology professor. [...]

After the 2014 coup ousting Ukraine’s elected President Yanukovych, the mainstream U.S. media hailed this unconstitutional move as a victory for “democracy” while ignoring the darker side, neo-Nazis coddled by the U.S. government since the Cold War, as Robert Parry wrote four days after the putsch. [...]

Former senator and secretary of state Hillary Clinton is the only candidate for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination who supported the invasion of Iraq. That war not only resulted in 4,500 American soldiers being killed and thousands more permanently disabled, but also hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, the destabilization of the region with the rise of the Islamic State and other ex [...]

One of the charms of the future is its powerful element of unpredictability, its ability to ambush us in lovely ways or bite us unexpectedly in the ass. Most of the futures I imagined as a boy have, for instance, come up deeply short, or else I would now be flying my individual jet pack through the spired cityscape of New York and vacationing on the moon. [...]

The father of a young American who died aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 is pressing Secretary of State John Kerry to release evidence to support his early claims that the U.S. government possessed details about the launch of the missile that killed 298 people, reports Robert Parry. The father of Quinn Schansman, the only American citizen to die in the 2014 shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Fli [...]