Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of Russia’s Republic of Chechnya, switched his car for bicycle to check the preparations for Grozny’s upcoming 200th birthday, and said he rode 40 kilometers around “the most beautiful city in the world.” 40 kilometers on the road or more… this is what the wheels of my bicycle made in Grozny,” Kadyrov told his followers on Russian VK (VKontakte) social network. [...]

The unusually frank quarterly report to Congress on the US's military operations against Daesh* in Syria and Iraq also hints that Washington has no exit strategy once the terrorists are defeated. [...]

France's mainstream political parties were scrambling for a way to stop the rise of the far-right National Front (FN) on Monday after it emerged with an historic first-round lead in regional elections. Boosted by fears over the Islamic State attacks that killed 130 people in Paris on Nov. 13, by record unemployment and worries about immigration, Marine Le Pen's party secured 27.7 percent of the [...]

Last week's US midterm elections received saturated media coverage. Why? The reality is that elections in the US don't change much, if anything, because America has a regime and is not a genuine democracy. The US midterms – and you'd have to have been locked in a wardrobe all week to have avoided hearing about them – reminded me of a great song by the 1980s indie-rock band The Smiths. [...]

Jihadists in Syria pose a direct threat to Russia, Putin has told a defense meeting in Moscow, adding that any targets threatening the country's military there should be destroyed. Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said Islamic State’s influence in Syria continues to expand. [...]

Trump opted not to speculate about the role which CIA claims the Saudi prince played in the Khashoggi case, saying that he first needs to confer with the intelligence officials and hear what they have to say. [...]

Greece has signed its first major privatization deal granting control of over a dozen regional airports to a German company. The agreement is part of international creditors’ demands to privatize state assets to secure €86 billion in bailout funds for Athens. The €1.23 billion contract gives a 40-year lease to the Frankfurt airport operator Fraport. [...]

Nord Stream 2 AG, a Swiss-based firm behind the construction of Gazprom’s gas pipeline across the Baltic Sea, has laid about 250 kilometers (155 miles) of pipes, company spokesman Jens Mueller told Sputnik. [...]

The Western powers were forced to admit that the Assad government enjoys some popular support in Syria. They had to change their position once Russia moved in militarily and altered the dynamic in Syria, Brian Becker from the anti-war Answer Coalition told RT. [...]

A new Crimean War would be the last, but few amongst the general public realize that endless baiting of Russia, the cycle of war games, sanctions, and false accusations could well lead to all-out war between NATO and Russia. [...]

In this episode of teleSUR's The Empire Files, Abby Martin interviews world-renowned philosopher and linguist Professor Noam Chomsky. Prof. Chomsky comments on the presidential primary "extravaganza," the movement for Bernie Sanders, the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal, the bombing of the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, modern-day libertarianism and the reality of "democracy" u [...]

All 24 Ukrainian sailors who were detained for illegally crossing the Russian maritime border in the Azov Sea have had charges brought against them by Russian investigators and now face up to six years in prison, lawyer Nikolay Polozov told Sputnik on Monday. [...]

In spite of prevailing clichés about corruption in Russia being out of control, the scale of the scourge is of an incomparably larger scale in the United States, according to independent journalist Einar Schlereth. In the journalist's view, nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of the US military industrial complex. [...]

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SpaceX founder Elon Musk praised the Russian-built RD-180 rocket engine for looking awesome but said his bitter rivals Lockheed and Boeing ought to be ashamed of using it during their launches. The eccentric tech billionaire said a few nice words about the RD-180 on Twitter, while mocking his competitors at the same time. [...]

There's no question about it. A new epoch—the Anthropocene—has begun.  So says an international group of geoscientists, in a paper published Friday in the journal Science. They point to waste disposal, fossil fuel combustion, increased fertilizer use, the testing and dropping of nuclear weapons, deforestation, and more as evidence that human activity has pushed the Earth into the new age that [...]

Tensions between Washington and Beijing have escalated in recent months amid a growing number of US Navy "freedom of navigation" missions in the South China Sea and Chinese efforts to beef up its military presence in territories over which several Asian powers have overlapping claims. [...]

The US and UK fear some kind of an arrangement between the EU and Russia, and are attempting to use Poland and Hungary as a wedge to prevent an understanding between Moscow and, in particular, Berlin, says independent journalist and commentator Martin Summers.   [...]

The Trump administration quietly downgraded the diplomatic status of the European Union’s mission to the US late last year, without informing the diplomats themselves, a German report has revealed. The European Union’s delegation to the US, which had previously enjoyed nation-state ambassador status, was reduced to “international organization” sometime in late October or early November 201 [...]

Crimean authorities are working hard to make Cannes- and Nice-bound vacationers change their mind and set their sights on the Black Sea peninsula, Russian media quoted Crimea’s top prosecutor as saying on Wednesday. Natalya Poklonskaya said that she couldn’t care less about the western [...]

The Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry said he would like to see Google, Facebook and other major social media behemoths broken up like the federal government did to Standard Oil more than a century ago. [...]

Stunned by falling poll numbers, Hillary Clinton is hoping that Democrats will rally to her neocon-oriented foreign policy and break with Bernie Sanders as insufficiently devoted to Israel. But will that hawkish strategy work this time, asks Robert Parry. In seeking to put Sen. Bernie Sanders on the defensive over his foreign policy positions, ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is embracing [...]