The Austrian President Heinz Fischer says the EU has to find a way to lift sanctions against Russia. "I always say that sanctions are disadvantageous for both sides," Fischer said at Wednesday’s meeting with Russia's State Duma Speaker Sergey Naryshkin. "It is important to find a way to lift them in the near future." [...]

The media hype has focused on Vladimir Putin (who was actually not named) and David Cameron (who wasn't either). However, the biggest loser from the Panama Paper’s fallout just might be Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko. [...]

If ‘Get Putin’ really was the agenda behind the data leaks as some believe, then the plan seems to have backfired as it is US ally David Cameron who is currently feeling the most heat from the revelations. Suspicions that this was a ‘hit job’ on an ‘official enemy’ of the US stem from the timing of the Panama Papers release [...]

Washington is behind the recently released offshore revelations known as the Panama Papers, WikiLeaks has claimed, saying that the attack was “produced” to target Russia and President Putin. On Wednesday, the international whistleblowing organization said on Twitter that the Panama Papers data leak was produced by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), "which targets [...]

Through its dysfunctional politics and over-reliance on military force, the United States is destroying both its Republic and its imperial reach, a problem made in the USA, said former Ambassador Chas W. Freeman Jr. in a recent speech. I’m here to talk about the end of the American empire. But before I do I want to note that one of our most charming characteristics as Americans is our amnesia [...]

Mainstream U.S. journalism and propaganda are getting hard to tell apart, as with the flurry of “corruption” stories aimed at Russia’s Putin and other demonized foreign leaders, writes Robert Parry. Sadly, some important duties of journalism, such as applying evenhanded standards on human rights abuses and financial corruption, have been so corrupted by the demands of government propagand [...]

In the first instance of a prominent politician taken down by the 11.5 million documents leaked in the Panama Papers, Iceland Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson resigned on Tuesday after fully 10 percent of Iceland's population rallied in protest of his wife's secret, offshore shell company holding millions. [...]

Less than an hour after polls closed in Wisconsin on Tuesday night, major news outlets called the night a victory for Bernie Sanders – the latest in a string of recent wins. SandersAs of this writing, with approximately 88% of precincts reporting, CNN reported Sanders winning with 56.2 percent of the vote compared to rival Hillary Clinton's 43.5 percent – a double-digit margin. [...]

Collusion between the Clinton Campaign and the DNC allowed Hillary Clinton to buy the loyalty of 33 state Democratic parties last summer. Montana was one of those states. It sold itself for $64,100. The Super Delegates now defying democracy with their insistent refusal to change their votes to Sanders in spite of a handful of overwhelming Clinton primary losses in their own states, were arguabl [...]

On the face of it, Trump is Reagan on steroids. His towering size, his nativist US supremacism, his down-home talk, and his reality-show confidence make him ideal for the role of bullying and big lies from the oval office. He is America come to meet itself in larger-than-life image to rejuvenate it as its pride slips away in third-world conditions and a multi-polar world. [...]

At the Democratic debate at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa on November 14, 2015, Hillary Clinton attempted to portray herself as the fierce enemy of hedge funds. She told the audience the following: “You have two billionaire hedge fund managers who started a Super PAC and they’re advertising against me in Iowa as we speak. So they clearly think I’m going to do what I say I will do� [...]

How stingy a friend Britain proved to be when - following much political grand-standing and calls for a very 'humanitarian intervention' against the Gaddafi regime in Libya - it could only muster £50,000 towards Libya’s reconstruction for 2016. [...]

Washington seems to agree with Russia that the Syrian people should decide whether President Bashar Assad remains in power. During a briefing, US State Department spokesperson Mark Toner said it is up to the Syrian people to decide the future government. [...]

Austrian armed forces are ready to cooperate with Moscow as “Russia is much closer to Austria than other major world powers,” chief of the Austrian General Staff said in Moscow, according to TASS. Vienna’s top military figure noted that one of the reasons for his visit to the Russian capital was to disobey others’ orders. [...]

With 28 killings in 2015, the US is the only country in the Americas and among OSCE members to be on the list of top executioners published by Amnesty International, coming right after Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan. [...]

$26 million went into the Clinton campaign before a single vote was cast. According to Counterpunch and Cenk Uygur, the host of Young Turks, the DNC and different states' Democaratic parties have long been funneling money into Hillary Clinton’s campaign /* */ [...]

Obama’s nuclear summit in Washington has been overshadowed by the absence of Russia. It is an absence that stands as an indictment of the lack of harmony and cooperation that continues to exist despite the growth of international terrorism. [...]

The Paris and Brussels attacks are blowback from what Islamic State terrorists see as betrayal by Western benefactors who thought using jihadists could bring “regime change” in Syria, says Pakistani analyst Nauman Sadiq. France under President Nicolas Sarkozy played a lead role in fomenting the insurgency against the Gaddafi regime in Libya in 2011, and Sarkozy’s successor, Francois Holla [...]

Despite favorable – even fawning – propaganda in Western media, the U.S./E.U.-backed regime in Ukraine tramples on traditional liberal values of tolerance and pluralism, notes James W Carden. The overnight train from Kiev to Slavyansk gives a passenger, if nothing else, ample time to read and think. On a return trip to war-torn eastern Ukraine in March, I took the opportunity the 13-hour jo [...]

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton attended a rally today with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo at New York City's Javits Center in celebration of the statewide $15 minimum wage increase. Hillary represented New York State in the U.S. Senate from 2001 to 2009 and currently resides in Chappaqua, New York. Members of several labor organizations unions along with the Working Families Part [...]

Anti-Putin sentiment has reached boiling point in the West, and that to a large degree makes it next to impossible to talk about Russia in a positive manner, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said, commenting on the so-called Panama leak. “Such 'leaks', in our view, are meant to target audiences overseas. It is also clear that the degree of Putinophobia has reached a point where to speak we [...]

The world’s media has been pointing at one person following a massive documents leak from a Panama law firm. But that person, President Vladimir Putin, wasn’t even mentioned in the data leak. Sections of the public are not happy at the media coverage. [...]