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 [...]

In the last years of the 20th century fraud entered US foreign policy in a new way. On false pretenses Washington dismantled Yugoslavia and Serbia in order to advance undeclared agenda. In the 21st century this fraud multiplied many times. Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Libya were destroyed, and Iran and Syria would also have been destroyed if the President of Russia had not prevented it. [...]

Early U.S. presidents warned that foreign entanglements could endanger the Republic, but it turns out that modern U.S. interventions are hazardous to the rest of the world as well, achieving neither democracy nor human rights, while spreading chaos and death, a tragic turn addressed by ex-CIA official Graham E. Fuller. [...]

According to Seymour Hersh, one of America’s best-known investigative journalists, the US recognizes Russia’s military success in Syria. Russians have acted in a very professional manner and managed to strengthen the Syrian Army, while US policy in the region has remained inconsistent [...]

The Hill reports in “Obama, Democrats at odds before State of the Union address” that “a group of House Democrats on Monday held a press conference introducing the State of the Union … by condemning the TPP, a mammoth trade deal among 12 Pacific Rim countries that would encompass as much as 40 percent of the world’s economy.” [...]

The grip that neocons and liberal interventionists have on Official Washington’s opinion circles is now so strong that “realists” who once provided an important counterbalance have been almost banished from foreign policy debates, a dangerous dilemma that James W Carden explores. In a widely remarked upon article for the online version of Foreign Policy last week, Harvard’s Stephen Walt [...]

Washington's constant attempts to impose its own vision of an ideal state system on Moscow are a huge mistake. While it might be acceptable to more modest, smaller countries, it is not to be tolerated by such a heavyweight, according to Matt Rojansky, Director of the Kennan Institute. [...]

UNITED NATIONS - The West continues its strong political and military support to one of its longstanding allies in the Middle East – Saudi Arabia –- despite withering criticism of the kingdom’s battlefield excesses in the ongoing war in neighboring Yemen. A Saudi-led coalition has been accused of using banned cluster bombs, bombing civilian targets and destroying hospitals – either by acci [...]

Journalists have noticed how much current political campaigns are trading on fear. As observed in a recent article in the Washington Post, “Most of the Republican presidential contenders and their allies are now waging campaigns focused on fear—bombarding voters with ominous television spots that warn of national security threats and amping up their alarming rhetoric on the stump.” [...]

he best thing about Thursday night’s Republican presidential primary debate, the sixth of twelve currently on the schedule for 2016, is that it means we are halfway to having no more Republican primary debates. Viewers who suffered through the entire two and a half hours of the event last night were presented with a smorgasbord of soaring demagoguery, sneering ad hominem attacks, and occasion [...]

President Obama said in his State of the Union address last night: “Now, what is true — and the reason that a lot of Americans feel anxious — is that the economy has been changing in profound ways, changes that started long before the Great Recession hit; changes that have not let up. [...]

This week we’re here at MIT in Cambridge, MA to interview world renowned linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky, someone who’s authored over 100 books on everything to war to propaganda. I wanted to get his take on democracy and elections in the context of American empire. [...]

Most in America were happy when Tehran promptly released ten US sailors, who were detained when their two boats drifted in Iran's territorial waters on Tuesday; but US hardliners were furious. "If you think about the [US] bases that surround Iran, you can understand why [the Islamic Republic] would be concerned when a heavily armed naval vessel ventures into Iranian territory," political analys [...]

Nearly 18 months after Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crashed in eastern Ukraine, one of the troubling mysteries is why the U.S. government – after rushing to blame Russia and ethnic Russian rebels – then went silent, effectively obstructing the investigation into 298 deaths, writes Robert Parry. As the whodunit mystery surrounding the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 nears the 1½-ye [...]