Yemeni Houthi rebels have released footage of what they say was a victorious offensive on the border with Saudi Najran province. It shows scores of captured military troops, including what seem to be Saudi officers, and hardware. [...]

Russian singer Victoria Tsyganova has sent a parcel to the wife of newly elected US president Donald Trump containing a jacket made of fur and cashmere. It will be delivered to the US by the Russian Post. According to the Russian Post, the parcel was sent to the US on Friday from Sheremetyevo airport on a regular flight to New York. [...]

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - The Russian Defense Ministry published satellite intelligence images proving that oil from Syria was sent abroad under the guard of US servicemen before and after the defeat of the Daesh terrorists, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said Saturday. [...]

Speculation published by CNN that US President-elect Donald Trump and his running mate Mike Pence might be assassinated on Inauguration Day is highly irresponsible, former US government officials told Sputnik. [...]

Seventy is normally considered a ripe old age at which people should be enjoying retirement. The NATO alliance, which meets to celebrate its anniversary in London, should have been pensioned off long ago. The French president, who told the Economist in early November that NATO was “brain dead”, seems determined to jolt the alliance and its members out of their collective coma. [...]

Britain’s Supreme Court has ruled Parliament has the right to vote on Article 50 before it is triggered by the prime minister. The decision marks a serious blow for the Conservative government, which had sought to bypass the legislature. [...]

The leadership of the chemical weapons watchdog took efforts to remove the paper trail of a dissenting report from Douma, Syria which pointed to a possible false flag operation there, leaked documents indicate.  In an internal email published by the transparency website WikiLeaks on Friday, a senior official from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) ordered that the doc [...]

Sanctions against Russia have failed to alter the Kremlin’s policies and actually increased popular support for Vladimir Putin. Now, there are growing calls for a change of tack. Like a lake reliant on multiple affluents, the individual headlines eventually morph into a whole. [...]

A Japanese businessman known as the Tuna King really goes to great lengths when it comes to giving sushi lovers the “best” bluefin tuna. This year he paid 193.2mn yen ($1.8mn) for one, the second-highest price on record. It is the second year in a row that Kiyoshi Kimura, who heads a popular sushi restaurant chain, was the most successful bidder at the traditional New Year’s auction at Tokyo [...]

President Trump’s chaotic first two weeks have seen senior aides reverse his most promising plans for restoring realism to U.S. foreign policy, especially regarding Russia and the Mideast, reports Daniel Lazare. Well, that didn’t take long, did it? The Trump administration hadn’t even reached its two-week mark when it surrendered a major portion of its independence and fell in behind the [...]

France, Britain and Germany have betrayed the 2015 nuclear deal after being threatened with US tariffs, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has claimed, noting that Europe has lost the moral high ground. The three European states accused Tehran of non-compliance with the accord after buckling under pressure from the United Sates, Zarif wrote in a tweet, citing a Washington Post report de [...]

China has become the world’s largest producer of solar energy, according to a new report from the country’s energy administration. The most populous nation on Earth nearly doubled their capacity for solar power in 2016, but they still have a very low per-capita rate for solar power use. [...]

The budget changes follow after London and Brussels managed to sign off on the Brexit deal and avoid a further delay, withdrawing the United Kingdom from the bloc after 47 years. Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has stated that his country would veto the European Union's long-term budget plan for post-Brexit Europe, stressing it should be lowered. [...]

I sometimes wonder what Путин must make of the Western media obsession with him. Do his ears burn each day with all the new articles, broadcasts, social media mentions – the myriad voices, guided by the Western political and media establishments, speculating, characterizing, creating – “Putin”? [...]

Authorities in Wuhan have closed the city’s first makeshift hospital after discharging the last batch of 34 recovered coronavirus patients, as the rate of infection in the city has dropped dramatically. Wuhan was the site of the original outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic, and the city’s response, building a new hospital in less than two weeks to handle Covid-19 patients, was seen as a moder [...]

Plummeting oil prices have sparked another round of predictions about the economic collapse of Russia – this time from US President Donald Trump, who sounded a lot like his predecessor Barack Obama on the subject. The price of crude oil has crashed to $20 this week, due to a one-two punch of Saudi Arabia flooding the market with record output and a sharp drop in global demand owing to the corona [...]

The orange-tinted freakshow that is Donald Trump should be removed from the White House and sent to some filthy, rat-infested dungeon with a sentence of Life Without Twitter. The same goes for the rest of his racist, eco-cidal, arch-plutocratic, and shockingly Christian Fascist administration. They should be forced to work sunup to sundown in a solar panel-making work camp in the Arizona desert. [...]

Brussels has all but abandoned them to their fates, so is it any wonder that Italy, Spain and other European countries have turned to Moscow and Beijing for meaningful support in terms of expert advice and medical supplies? When this coronavirus pandemic has passed and the nations of the European Union are counting the cost of decimated populations, shattered public health infrastructures and [...]

Maine resident Garry Godfrey spent nine years on a transplant list, waiting for a new kidney. Then he was abruptly bumped off because of a hospital policy that forbids transplants for smokers of medical marijuana. [...]

Despite the impact Covid-19 has had on the global economy, the US is seeking more funding to counter and confront China in the Pacific, as well as enhancing its military preparedness for scenarios involving nuclear warfare. The coronavirus outbreak has impacted the global economy in a unique and unprecedented fashion unseen since World War II. Around 63 percent of Japanese businesses have projecte [...]

China’s Foreign Minister warned that an armed conflict with North Korea may break out “at any moment,” urging Washington and Pyongyang to tone down their hawkish rhetoric and realize the price to pay for both sides if a new Korean War were to start. [...]

The rapid proliferation of nuclear and conventional weapons post-Cold War indicates that governments continue to think of ‘security’ largely in military terms – but Covid-19 has exposed the fallacies in this way of thinking. Evidently, for world leaders, military power is regarded as a vital instrument of state policy and many countries have amassed huge destructive arsenals in a bid to acqu [...]