The US-Chinese standoff in the South China Sea is heating up, with Washington dispatching a small armada to the area following reports that Beijing had reinforced a key island with fighters and air defenses. Much has been said and written about the dispute, with Russian analysts left pondering: if push comes to shove, what will Russia's role be? [...]

Iran’s New Year celebration of Nowruz finds it weathering a perfect storm of US sanctions, low oil prices and Covid-19. The resulting humanitarian crisis may make it even more resilient, as Iranians rally around their government. Iran is facing an existential crisis, brought on by a combination of economic, political and social emergencies which, when combined, threaten to bring the nation to it [...]

Russia has all the chances to emerge “as the de facto leader of the major oil producing nations of the world, accounting for almost 73 percent of the global oil supply”; and in fact has already taken some of the required to do so, according to US-based oil expert Rakesh Upadhyay. “Russia has played a master stroke in the current oil crisis by taking the lead in forming a new cartel, but i [...]

As the COVID-19 outbreak onboard the US Navy aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt gets worse, its captain has penned a pleading letter to the Navy for enough resources to isolate his entire crew. “Request all available resources to find NAVADMIN [Navy Personnel Command] and CDC [US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] compliant quarantine rooms for my entire crew as soon as possible,� [...]

A nuclear engine currently being developed in Russia by the nuclear agency Rosatom and the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) will allow a spaceship to reach Mars in an unprecedentedly short period of just 1.5 months, Rosatom’s General Director Sergei Kirienko said Wednesday. [...]

Fresh market data shows that Brent as well as WTI prices briefly rebounded by 1-3 percent in the hours after the OPEC+ talks on Sunday, but then showed a downward trend, which a top Wall Street bank says is likely to continue in the coming weeks. Goldman Sachs has forecast that oil prices will continue to fall in the weeks to come, arguing that a “historic yet insufficient” OPEC+ deal [...]

The Republican establishment likes to pretend that it is the responsible alternative to Donald Trump, but that self-image doesn’t match reality, as Bill Moyers and Michael Winship describe. From their “Dark Money” bagman Karl Rove to their philosophical guru David Brooks, the GOP elites are in a tizzy over saving the Republican Party from Donald Trump and the other intruders, extremists a [...]

China has faced numerous accusations over its handling of the initial COVID-19 outbreak from US officials, including President Donald Trump who claims that the virus escaped from a Chinese laboratory and that Beijing was hiding the true information about the state of the outbreak in its early stages. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has vehemently denied a report by the German magazine Der Spie [...]

Following the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris in November, Brussels’ town hall was lit in the colors of the French flag. Today, sadly, the Eiffel Tower is being lit for Brussels. On Tuesday, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo announced that the tower would be lit in black, yellow, and red, to show solidarity after terrorist attacks of the morning left at least 31 dead and many more injured. [...]

One of the only countries in Europe not to institute strict lockdown measures amid the coronavirus crisis, Belarus has so far managed to keep virus-related fatalities impressively low. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has taken a shot at the world’s elites, accusing them of taking advantage of the coronavirus pandemic to put “trillions of dollars in their pockets” while the [...]

An investigation into a massive global oil bribery scandal has been launched by authorities in the US, Britain, and Australia, after leaked confidential files indicated that some of the world’s most powerful corporations were part of the racket. [...]

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has said he will be the first person in the country to take Russia’s recently announced Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine when it arrives.“I am pleased that Russia will be the first country in the world to vaccinate its population,” Maduro said in a televised address on Sunday. [...]

On the face of it, Trump is Reagan on steroids. His towering size, his nativist US supremacism, his down-home talk, and his reality-show confidence make him ideal for the role of bullying and big lies from the oval office. He is America come to meet itself in larger-than-life image to rejuvenate it as its pride slips away in third-world conditions and a multi-polar world. [...]

Attorney Marilyn York owns a Men’s Rights Family Law Firm in Reno Nevada, established in 2001. She and her ten female employees focus on representing men for two reasons: 1. As her talk explains, fathers are crucial in the upbringing and development of their children; and 2. Fathers are the disadvantaged parent in family court and society and while the laws are improving, the statistics ar [...]

British Prime Minister David Cameron is facing increasing calls to resign in the wake of revelations that he had profited from offshore tax havens and personally intervened to prevent a crackdown on tax evasion in the United Kingdom. [...]

26 people, comprising 19 air cadets and seven flight crew, were killed after the Antonov AN-26 military transport plane they were traveling in slammed into the ground outside an air base about 420 km east of Kiev on Friday night. One cadet survived the crash. CCTV camera footage captured the final seconds of the flight of the An-26 aircraft which crashed in Kharkiv region, eastern Ukraine [...]

The argument over whether Hillary Clinton is a neocon may have been settled by her hawkish debate performance on Thursday, which followed her Israel-pandering speech before AIPAC, reports Robert Parry. If there were any doubts that Hillary Clinton favors a neoconservative foreign policy, her performance at Thursday’s debate should have laid them to rest. In every meaningful sense, she is a ne [...]

Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, worried that a "blue tsunami" could wipe out the Republican senate majority, laid into President Trump this week, calling him a narcissist who kisses dictators' butts and sells out the US' allies.US President Donald Trump has laid into a Republican senator who called him a "TV-obsessed narcissist" who "spends like a drunken sailor". [...]

Damascus and Moscow have signed nearly a billion dollars worth of agreements to rebuild war-torn Syria, according to the Prime Minister Wael al-Halqi. The two countries intend to develop energy, trade, finance and other sectors of the economy. [...]

A cancer charity created by presumed president-elect Joe Biden failed to allocate a single dollar for medical research, according to media reports, with most of the group’s cash going towards generous salaries. Federal tax filings reveal that the Biden Cancer Initiative, founded in 2017 by the former vice president and his wife Jill, did not distribute grants during its first two years of operat [...]

In September 19, 2000, going on 16 years ago, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the London Telegraph reported: “Declassified American government documents show that the US intelligence community ran a campaign in the Fifties and Sixties to build momentum for a united Europe. It funded and [...]

The United States and Eritrea are the only countries in the world to tax based on citizenship. If you’re a US citizen living outside the United States, you still have yearly IRS tax filing obligations. These tax filing obligations can be an expensive annual hassle (even if you owe no tax). They may even result in double taxation. Fortunately, properly renouncing your US citizenship can provide [...]