Lebanon has accused Israel of being behind a drone strike on the office of Hezbollah near Beirut on 25 August, followed by another on Palestinian militant positions in eastern Lebanon. [...]

A week ago, after meeting Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced that the two sides had made progress on the matter of coordination and intelligence sharing in the air war against al-Nusra (now re-dubbed Fatah al-Sham) and ISIL in Syria. [...]

Multiple Patriot launchers, Aegis destroyers and radars are guarding Saudi skies, but they failed to stop a massive strike on an oilfield because their actual properties aren’t what the US advertises, a Russian Army source says. [...]

Federal data released Aug. 9 shows that Americans’ wages are dropping again, seven years after President Barack Obama declared the economy had recovered from the property-bubble — and three months before the 2016 election. [...]

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - The US Department of State has approved a proposed sale of 150 Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine in a deal valued at nearly $40 million, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) said in a press release on Thursday.  "The Government of Ukraine has requested to buy one hundred fifty (150) Javelin missiles and ten (10) Javelin Command Launch Units (CLUs)," the releas [...]

Russian officials have reached out to Ankara to request access to the American-built base as a convenient launch pad for airstrikes in the Syrian theater, but it remains to be seen whether such cooperation will roil NATO’s feathers. Russia has called on Turkey to provide access to NATO’s Incirlik Air Base, the critical launch pad for US and coalition airstrikes in Syria [...]

The United States maintains nearly three dozen military bases in Germany, with troops stationed in the country since the end of the Second World War, and long after the end of the Cold War and the withdrawal of Soviet/Russian troops from the country in the early 1990s. [...]

The death of Warren Hinckle, a journalist long forgotten outside San Francisco, brings back Ramparts magazine’s crowning moment, also one of crucial moments of postwar liberalism. At a stroke, in March, 1967, the presumptions of innocence by purportedly freedom-loving (albeit hawkish) prestigious intellectuals were stripped off. It turned out that the grand banquets and conferences with literary [...]

The Australian taxpayer will foot the bill for a $85 million (AUS$125 mn) Growler fighter jet that burst into flames on the runway due to an engine fault. The US Navy will not reimburse Australia for the “dud” warplane. [...]

The liberation of Aleppo by the Syrian Army delivers a "heavy blow" to all terrorist groups which have been fighting in the country for over four years, according to Argentine journalist Leandro Albani. Leandro has worked as a reporter in the Middle East for the magazine Sudestada and websites such as Resumen Latinoamericano and Marcha.org. [...]

On Friday, US President Donald Trump signed the FY2020 National Defence Authorisation Act into law, with its provisions including sanctions against the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project. A day later, the Treasury confirmed that the restrictions had snapped into place. [...]

The European Union should maintain a “strong” and “independent” approach in foreign and domestic policy, regardless of who the current US President is, Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz told RT. The official spoke following a meeting with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, in which they discussed ties between the EU and Moscow. [...]

As part of its strategic goal of building a nationwide high-speed rail network, Beijing plans to invest about 800 billion yuan (US$114.36 billion) on the expansion of the country's railways in 2020. According to China’s Ministry of Transport (MOT), 1.8 trillion yuan might be spent on roads and waterways, and about 90 billion yuan on civil aviation. The country will strive to cover 98 percent of [...]

It seems so strange, twenty-seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to be living through a new Cold War with (as it happens, capitalist) Russia. The Russian president is attacked by the U.S. political class and media as they never attacked Soviet leaders; he is personally vilified as a corrupt, venal dictator, who arrests or assassinates political opponents and dissident journalists, and [...]

Donald Trump’s threat to cut off Iraq’s access to its account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York if Baghdad insists on a withdrawal of US troops from its soil is bare-faced, modern-day colonialism. Let’s set the scene. On January 5, the Iraqi parliament voted to approve a resolution calling for the removal of US troops. A day later, Donald Trump threatened to hit Iraqis with deadly ec [...]

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin’s first telephone conversation indicates a new chapter will be opened in US-Russia relations, as, by reaching out to Moscow, the US leader has shown he’s capable of overriding internal opposition, Daniel McAdams told RT. [...]

This week, in defiance of the Trump administration, London formally granted Chinese tech giant Huawei the right to build part of the UK’s 5G mobile internet network, albeit capping its UK market share at 35 percent and restricting involvement to “non-core” infrastructure. The US, which lobbied intensely to block Huawei, expressed disappointment. [...]

President Trump is getting a crash course on the U.S. Constitution’s separation of powers as federal courts knock down his temporary immigration ban aimed at seven mostly Muslim countries, reports Marjorie Cohn. On Jan. 27, President Trump made good on his campaign promise to institute a ban on Muslims entering the U.S. Trump’s executive order (“EO”) is titled “Protecting the Nation F [...]

Vladimir Putin has confided that US President Donald Trump privately lamented the "insane" US military budget. He also says Russia protects itself by making the costs of attacking the country too high for anyone to contemplate. The US has outstripped us” in terms of annual defense expenditure, the Russian president said in a new episode of news agency TASS's ‘20 Questions to Vladimir Putin� [...]

The government in Vienna is working on amendments to Austrian laws that would allow troops to be sent to other European countries to help them "protect their borders" from illegal migrants and refugees, the Austrian defense minister has said. [...]

An emergency response from the US Federal Reserve failed to calm investors amid the coronavirus panic and led to another market bloodbath. However, it didn’t have any other options, a former Fed insider believes. If the Fed had been silent then we might have even seen more disruption,” Danielle DiMartino Booth said in an interview with RT’s Boom Bust. “Sadly, they’ve backed themselves in [...]

German Minister for Foreign Affairs Sigmar Gabriel, who is in Moscow for talks with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov, says that Germany fears a new arms race in Europe. “We are concerned that a new spiral of the arms race may emerge in Europe,” he said, as cited by TASS. “It’s too early to say how and in what direction we could advance to prevent this.” [...]