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. [...]

Thursday night, Hillary Clinton told a roomful of top campaign donors that she lost the Presidential election because of Vladimir Putin and James Comey — but the donors don’t appear to be buying her story of woe. [...]

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 [...]

Greece's national rail company TrainOSE has been sold to Italy's state railway group Ferrovie dello Stato (FS) for €45 million ($48.1 million). The sale is part of Greece’s €86 billion bailout agreed with international creditors two years ago. [...]

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 [...]

Women in several cities have reported sex attacks committed during New Year's Eve celebrations, the Austrian press reports. The number female victims of sex attacks in the Austrian city of Innsbruck has risen to 19 after the parents of several teeenage girls reported the crimes to police, Austrian media reported on Tuesday. [...]

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 [...]

A civilian transport vehicle capable of hauling up to 500 tons of cargo across oceans is in the early stages of development in Russia. The vehicle would fly just meters over the surface to utilize so-called ground effect for better fuel efficiency. A ground-effect vehicle is a combination of a maritime vessel and an aircraft. [...]

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. [...]

President Trump’s calls for reorienting American foreign policy look to be disintegrating in his first two weeks in office as he embraces the neoconservative hostilities toward Iran and Russia, as Andrew The Trump Administration’s goal of de-escalating tensions with Russia is meeting stiff resistance in Eastern Europe where many reject the notion that a diplomatic solution can be reached ov [...]

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 [...]

President Trump’s “Great Wall” ignores a key reason why desperate Mexicans and Central Americans flee north – the history of U.S. military and economic intervention that has created poverty and repression, notes William Blum. Instead of building a “Great Wall” on the Mexican border, President Trump might find it so much cheaper, so much easier, so much more humane, so much more popu [...]

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 [...]

Beijing has called on the US to stop its hacking practices against China and other countries, following a WikiLeaks release which reportedly exposes the CIA’s extensive hacking capabilities and lists Chinese routers as targets. [...]

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 [...]

The US Marines’ King Stallion will not only be the world’s priciest helicopter but also it is poised be acquired at a higher per-unit cost than the US Air Force’s insanely expensive F-35A. Both aerial vehicles share at least one other characteristic, aside from their absurdly high cost and regular poor performance, as they are both manufactured by Lockheed Martin or subsidiary Sikorsk [...]

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 [...]

According to Mexican Secretary of Agriculture Jose Calzada Rovirosa, Mexico plans to strengthen trade ties with Russia and the EU. Mexico plans to strengthen trade ties with Russia and the European Union against the backdrop of bilateral relation issues with the United States, Secretary of Agriculture Jose Calzada Rovirosa said on Tuesday. [...]

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 [...]

Analysts in the US have called on the government to invest more in the Arctic in order to rival Russia's economic development there, but such a comparison is misplaced, Heather Exner-Pirot, Managing Editor of the Arctic Yearbook, told Radio Sputnik. [...]

By announcing its intent to withdraw from the Open Skies Treaty, the Trump administration continues its war on legacy arms control agreements, endangering international security. The Trump administration has formally announced its intention to withdraw from the 2002 Open Skies Treaty (OST), a critical multilateral agreement involving 35 states which allows specially equipped reconnaissance aircraf [...]

The U.S. government and the mainstream media rushed to judgment again, blaming the Syrian government for a new poison-gas attack and ignoring other possibilities, reports Robert Parry. With the latest hasty judgment about Tuesday’s poison-gas deaths in a rebel-held area of northern Syria, the mainstream U.S. news media once more reveals itself to be a threat to responsible journalism and to t [...]