Citing an anti-Russia policy brief, US lawmakers approved $200 million for providing "lethal weapons of a defensive nature" to the Ukrainian government as part of the $600 billion Pentagon budget proposal for the fiscal year 2016. The House Armed Services Committee passed its proposal for the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) with a bipartisan vote of 60 to 2, in what Defense News [...]

The US Supreme Court is hearing arguments on lethal injections for the first time in nearly a decade, following a botched execution in Oklahoma and amid a nationwide shortage of the drugs used in the procedure. On Wednesday, the state of Oklahoma and lawyers for three death row inmates there presented their arguments to the Supreme Court, where the nine justices appeared to be sharply split bet [...]

Texas Governor Greg Abbott told state troopers to monitor a US military training exercise, codenamed Jade Helm 15, after locals showed concern that the looming maneuvers actually look more like an "exercise in the imposition of martial law." The large-scale operation involves elite teams from four branches of the military, including the SEALs and Green Berets, and is set to kick off in seven st [...]

The Department of Defense has asked Congress to allow Russian rocket engines to be used until 2022, in order to keep the country's space program going. The US is partly dependent on the Russian technology for launching its satellites into orbit. General John Hyten, head of the US Air Force Space Command, spoke about extending the use of Russian engines to journalists on Tuesday, TASS reported. [...]

Amnesty International has accused Washington of "sweeping under the carpet" a December Senate report that the CIA tortured militants using the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" during the post 9/11 War on Terror. Naureen Shah, a researcher for Amnesty, accused the Obama administration of ignoring the painstaking five year investigation, which culminated in the Senate Report. [...]

Iran's supreme leader says the United States has created the “myth” of nuclear weapons to paint Tehran as a “source of threat.” The tough rhetoric comes days before nuclear talks are set to resume in Vienna. "They created the myth of nuclear weapons so they could say the Islamic Republic is a source of threat,” Khamenei said in a televised address to a hall of several hundred military [...]

US President Barack Obama has admitted he was "surprised" that Moscow held back resumption of S-300 supplies to Iran for so long. Some Israeli officials are reportedly saying the prospect of derailing the Iran nuclear talks is now zero. After President Vladimir Putin lifted the ban on S-300 supply to Iran last Monday, Obama made his first official comment on Friday. [...]

The laws of the global economy should be written by the United States and not by the likes of China according to President Obama, as concern over China's influence is growing. Washington hopes a Pacific free trade pact will curb Beijing's investment bank. "When 95 percent of our potential customers live abroad, we must be sure that we are writing the rules for the global economy, not a country [...]

Major American media organizations diligently parrot what US officials want the public to know about global affairs, historian Noam Chomsky told RT. To US leaders, any news outlet that “does not repeat the US propaganda system is intolerable,” he said. The culpability of the West – namely the United States – for world affairs, such as the Ukrainian conflict or tensions with Iran, is ano [...]

Emails published this week by WikiLeaks reveal that a senior State Dept. official asked the CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment for help in countering the narratives of the Russian Federation and the so-called Islamic State. Internal Sony correspondence that was leaked to the web following last year’s colossal SPE hack and now mirrored by the anti-secrecy group shows that Richard Stengel, the [...]

At the height of mass protests last year in Ferguson, Missouri, the state’s National Guard referred to demonstrators as “enemy forces” and “adversaries,” according to internal documents obtained by CNN. Through Freedom of Information Act requests, the news network obtained files authored by the Missouri National Guard last year as it readied to deploy in the St. Louis suburb of Fergus [...]

Paratroopers of the US 173rd Airborne Brigade, based in Vincenza, Italy, have arrived in western Ukraine to provide training for Ukrainian government troops. The announcement came on US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt's twitter account. The diplomat posted pictures of the US paratroopers marching through the airport in the western Ukrainian city of Lvov. [...]

Vladimir Putin is defending Russian interests, and is not the devil the US media make him out to be, the CNN's founding CEO wrote. Arguing using historical facts and personal experience, Reese Schonfeld expressed a belief that Russia is not the enemy. The Russian president “may not be a nice man, but he certainly is not the devil that we are making him,” Reese Schonfeld wrote in his Huffing [...]

A secret memo prepared by a Congressional think tank and seen by the Daily Mail says that the US may need a "reassessment of the special relationship" with its key economic partner, Britain, "because its geopolitical setting has been changing." Winston Churchill's 1946 speech to Westminster College, in Fulton, coined the phrase "special relationship" to describe the exceptionally friendly polit [...]

The NSA is implementing a huge migration to custom-designed cloud architecture it says will revolutionize internal security and protect against further leaks by data analysts with unfettered access to classified information. Put simply, the NSA hopes to keep future Edward Snowdens out by employing a cloud file storage system it built from scratch. [...]

Easter should be a time of celebration for Christians, but for those of the faith living in the Middle East, there hasn't been too much to celebrate in recent years. "Kill the Christians" is the title of a new BBC documentary, to be broadcast this week. [...]

As the Saudi-led airstrikes in Yemen continue and the fighting on the ground intensifies, US citizens stuck in Yemen have lashed out at Washington for ignoring their pleas for help as they try to leave the war-torn country. Aerial bombardment and street battles have become a daily reality for people in Yemen. “We hear a few bombings a day. It’s very scary right now,” Arwa Al-Iraine, a US [...]

Although some lawmakers, including Democrats, believe Congress should have a say in any potential removal of Iranian sanctions, most Americans say Congress should not keep a possible a nuclear deal from being implemented. Roughly 61 percent of Americans support the framework agreement struck between Iran and the P5+1 (the US, UK, France, China, Russia and Germany) earlier this month, according [...]

The US may no longer be in control of the global economy, warned former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, urging Washington to regain dominance by honoring commitments and stopping its own hypocrisy. China’s establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), and Washington’s failure to stop its traditional allies from joining, was a development without precedent since the [...]

A well-monitored vote should be held in Crimea to let the people of Crimea decide if they want to be Russians or Ukrainians, US Congressman Dana Rohrabacher said at the annual US-Russia Forum in Washington DC. Crimea's secession from Ukraine took place after a new government was installed in Kiev through a coup in February, 2014, which alienated Crimea's majority Russian-speaking population of [...]

The Pentagon is yet to officially acknowledge the downing of a surveillance drone over ISIS-free territory controlled by the Syrian govt, but scarce details of the incident hint at US involvement going beyond its self-mandated anti-ISIS plan in Syria. Anonymously, US military sources have confirmed that the country has lost contact with one of its drones over Syria, after SANA news agency repor [...]

The Obama administration claimed an unmatched commitment to government transparency this week, even as it denied or delayed more requests for public information than ever, and claimed exemption from freedom of information laws. After announcing that its Office of Administration would no longer be subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) on the National Freedom of Information Day, the Wh [...]