The US has repeatedly blamed China for failing to contain the spread of the virus from Wuhan and for reporting the disease to the World Health Organisation too late. US President Donald Trump took to Twitter to reiterate his position concerning China's role in the coronavirus outbreak. Earlier this week, Chinese Ambassador to the United Nations Zhang Jun said that the US should stop using scapegoa [...]

The video shows a passenger train making its first journey through the city of Aleppo for the first time in four and a half years. The war had left the railway service disrupted. However, as the city is returning to normal life, the train carried its first passengers through the newly liberated Aleppo. [...]

On Oct. 24, 2019—45 days before the world’s first suspected case of COVID-19 was announced—a new “scorecard” was published called the Global Health Security Index. The scorecard ranked countries on how prepared they were to tackle a serious outbreak, based on a range of measures, including how quickly a country was likely to respond and how well its health care system would “treat the [...]

US President Donald Trump received the lowest approval rating — and highest disapproval rating — for a new president in recent history, according to a survey released Friday. The poll, from CNN, showed that a 53% majority said they disapprove of the way Trump is handling his job two weeks into office [...]

Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis has rejected US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s push to limit his country’s contacts with Russian and Chinese firms and grant a nuclear power plant construction contract to an American firm. Russia and China pose a threat to Czech energy independence, Pompeo said during his visit to Prague on Wednesday. The top US diplomat warned of what he described as [...]

Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a law on the ratification of the agreement with Ankara on the Turkish Stream gas pipeline. The lower house of the Russian parliament, the State Duma, ratified the agreement on January 20, while the upper house, the Federation Council, ratified the document on February 1. [...]

Trump supporters may make the following claims in voting for him, as bolstering for their reasoning to make such a vote. Here is how that reasoning is flawed. Voting for Trump because you think he “cares about America” and Americans. Just one recent example of how he doesn’t: President Donald Trump demanded that a reporter remove his face mask in the middle of a question at a White House [...]

As Democrats compete to become the new War Party – pushing for a dangerous confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia – some constituents are objecting, as Mike Madden did in a letter to Sen. Amy Klobuchar. Dear Senator Klobuchar, I write with concern over statements you have made recently regarding Russia. These statements have been made both at home and abroad, and they involve two issues; t [...]

Russia has delivered the first batch of its Covid-19 vaccine to Venezuela, making it the first Latin American nation to participate in Sputnik V’s clinical trial. “We are the first country from the Western Hemisphere which will start the Phase III trial of this vaccine against Covid-19,” Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro tweeted, expressing his gratitude to Russia. [...]

People living in the United States have entered into one of the most dangerous periods of the 21st century. Donald Trump, the president, is not only a twisted caricature of every variation of economic, political, educational, and social fundamentalism, he is the apogee of an increasingly intolerant and authoritarian culture committed to destroying free speech, civil rights, women’s reproductive [...]

Noam Chomsky warns that the Trump administration poses a unique threat to humanity, and its most reckless policies are receiving far too little attention. Noam Chomsky discusses the White House’s threats to the New START treaty, the last remaining accord limiting the US and Russia’s nuclear weapons arsenals; its latest round of crippling sanctions and threats against Iran; the bipartisan US re [...]

The Wall Street Journal has dialed up the paranoia over former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn's so-called 'Russia ties' over his failure to disclose an 'interaction' he had with a Russian-British national at a security conference in 2014. But as social media users, including a Russian senator, point out, WSJ's case is extremely weak. [...]

Donald Trump’s lack of input at the G20 summit made it easy to ignore him. While Joe Biden will play more of a role globally, the rest of the world should not look to him for leadership given the turmoil America is in at present. The 2020 G20 Riyadh summit took place over the weekend with participating nations discussing greater cooperation in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic, the global econ [...]

Wheelchair-bound Russian singer Yulia Samoylova said she can’t comprehend what scared the Ukrainian authorities so much that they slapped her with a three-year ban. Samoylova said she still hopes to perform at Eurovision in Kiev. [...]

The Microsoft cofounder has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into coronavirus vaccine research using the Gates Foundation, including the vaccine by AstraZeneca, and has urged governments and corporations around the world to create enough vaccines for every person on the planet. Bill Gates doesn’t expect the US to receive a government-approved coronavirus vaccine until at least the [...]

Powerful forces are arrayed against any significant changes that President Trump may try to make in foreign policy, a dilemma made worse by his own ineptness and staffing troubles, writes Robert Parry. President Trump’s emerging foreign policy is one of contradictions and chaos, caught up in a combination of old establishment orthodoxies and some fresh recognition of reality but without any s [...]

The Russian vaccine created at the Gamaleya Research Centre in Moscow is being rolled out internationally in the race to control the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the chief executive of Russia's sovereign wealth fund said on Thursday. The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) plans to expand its operations and increase the rollout of Russia's Sputnik V vaccine across the globe amid the ong [...]

Russia strongly backs Iranian membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), now that UN Security Council sanctions have been lifted from the country, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said. Iran is ready to become a full-fledged member of the organization, Lavrov said Friday during an SCO Council of Foreign Ministers meeting in Astana. [...]

A hard-hitting report by a Chinese group has slammed the US for its history of “humanitarian disasters” under the guise of human rights. The accusation fuels an escalating war of words between Beijing and Washington. A Chinese organization has published a report slamming the United States as responsible for a “History of Humanitarian Disasters” citing what it described as “America [...]

An Austrian tank platoon came in first in this year’s NATO tank competition, co-hosted by the US and Germany. Newcomer Ukraine finished second to last, beating out Poland. The annual Strong Europe Tank Challenge at the US Army’s Grafenwoehr Training Area in Germany this week featured teams from NATO members Germany, France, Poland, and the US, as well as non-members Austria and Ukraine, in [...]

Sleep researchers have, for the first time, observed the human mind consolidating and storing memories in incredible detail, in real time, reinforcing existing ideas about the function and importance of sleep to human cognition. For decades, there has been a strong but poorly understood connection between sleep and the formation and solidification of memory in the human brain. In a recent s [...]

Independent Russian military analyst Vladimir Tuchkov outlines why Russia's Su-35S 4++ generation fighter aircraft may soon receive the capability to defeat the US's fifth-generation F-22 Raptor stealth tactical fighter in air-to-air combat. [...]