Turkey is pressuring Germany to create “safe zones” inside Syria as a “price” for alleviating the EU’s refugee crisis. It’s a Faustian bargain that could escalate the Syrian conflict, where NATO forces could end up pitted against Russia’s military. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s hot-footing to Istanbul last weekend was capped with a U-turn regarding Turkey’s much sought-aft [...]

Until recently, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was considered to be the most powerful politician in Europe. But now, her approach to the refugee crisis has her under fire at home and in Brussels. Can she survive? For almost three quarters of an hour, it was as though there was no refugee crisis in Germany. [...]

Russia’s intervention in Syria amid the EU migrant crisis has possibly prevented a NATO induced crisis similar to the one in Kosovo, where refuges where used as an excuse for bombing, suggests international affairs commentator Marco Gasic. [...]

When I was a kid, three presidents told us we had to fight in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, because if we didn’t fight them over there, we’d have to fight them on the beaches of California. We believed. It was a lie. I was a teenager during the Cold War, and several presidents told us we needed to create massive stockpiles of nuclear weapons, garrison the world, invade Cuba, fight in odd litt [...]

Official Washington’s neocon-dominated “group think” on Syria is that everything is the fault of President Assad and Russian President Putin, but the actual history shows many missed opportunities for peace because of the U.S. obsession with dictating “regime change” in country after country, as Jonathan Marshall explains. [...]

Former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, committed the UK to joining the US invasion of Iraq a year before it began, a newly disclosed White House memo reveals. The US documents obtained by the Daily Mail and published on Sunday are part of the batch of emails from the private server of former US State Secretary, Hillary Clinton, which US courts have made her disclose. [...]

DOHA - Amidst the wilderness of mirrors surrounding the Syrian tragedy, a diamond-shaped fact persists: Despite so many degrees of separation, the Saudis are still talking to the Russians. Why? A key reason is because a perennially paranoid House of Saud feels betrayed by their American protectors who, under the Obama administration, seem to have given up on isolating Iran. [...]

Aeroflot subsidiary Pobeda will start flying to Vienna and Bratislava from December 19. Tickets are on sale from Thursday with prices starting from 999 rubles ($15) including taxes and fees. The $15 promotional tickets will be offered to loyal customers, with one or two tickets available per flight, Russian business media RBK reported last week. [...]

Solar provides 100 percent of electricity to airport, with excess power sold to the grid and bought back at night. Cochin International Airport in southern India’s Kerala state may be best known as the gateway to the tourist beaches and houseboats of the region’s famous backwaters. Now it has a new claim to fame: world’s first solar airport. Since August, the airport has used 46,000 so [...]

Reiterating his prior ruling which found the U.S. government's surveillance of civilians' telephone records to be unconstitutional—"Orwellian," even—a federal judge on Monday ordered the National Security Agency to halt its bulk collection program. [...]

Anonymous, a loose and decentralized coalition of hackers, plans to release the identities of at least 1,000 people it says are members of the Ku Klux Klan on Thursday, organizers said. OperationKKK, or #OpKKK as it is being called on Twitter, began one year ago when members of the KKK — a white supremacist hate group founded in 1865 — said it would use deadly force against protesters d [...]

President Vladimir Putin has agreed with the Federal Security Service to halt all Russian flights to Egypt following an October 31 passenger plane crash in Sinai that killed all 224 people on board. [...]

Tucker Carlson is the surprising voice of reason on Syria. The Jimmy Dore Show is a hilarious and irreverent take on news, politics and culture featuring Jimmy Dore, a professional stand up comedian, author and podcaster. With over 5 million downloads on iTunes, the show is also broadcast on KPFK stations throughout the country. It is part of the Young Turks Network-- the largest online news sh [...]

A Russian fighter jet was forced to enter Turkish airspace in early October while performing an evasive maneuver against a surface-to-air missile system, the commander of Russia’s Air Force said. “Our fighter jet was on a combat mission in Northern Syria in very dense cloud conditions.  [...]

Students from more than 100 American universities are set to unite in a Million Student March to protest over tuition fees, student debt and higher wages for campus workers. “We are people of all colors, genders, and sexual orientation, and we are united to fight for education as a human right,” the movement’s statement reads. [...]

At no time in history has the persecution of Christians been as intense and widespread as it is at the moment. There is a global war on Christians, which has escalated in scale and intensity since the US invasion of Iraq. After the deliberate destruction of nation states and government structures all over the Middle East, Islamist groups have seized the opportunity to wage war on and persecute [...]

Threatening continued assaults on the Kurdish militia in Syria, the Turkish president has warned he will not request anyone’s permission to do whatever is necessary to prevent the spread of support for Kurdish autonomy, even if it requires bombing US-allied rebels.   [...]

The devaluation of its currency opens up new possibilities for the Russian economy, says Birgit Hansl, World Bank lead economist for Russia. “For the first time in decades, “Made in Russia” might have a chance to become again a global trademark. [...]

I first came to the conclusion that the U.S. is a dictatorship in 2002, when I found proof that George W. Bush was lying to claim that he possessed proof that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding his WMD (weapons of mass destruction) stockpiles, and when the U.S. and UK ’news’ media hid this crucial fact that their heads-of-state were lying. [...]

Something really fishy is going on in Syria, US Marine combat veteran Gordon Duff notes, adding that Western mass media remains suspiciously mute about the matter. There are lots of battles being fought across Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Cameroon, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Libya, accompanied by various local conflicts, US Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War and senior editor of Vet [...]

Nobel Prize-winning scientist Angus Deaton and Anne Case have come out with shocking conclusions that white middle-aged Americans are the only first-world group of people dying faster than their counterparts in any other developed country. [...]

The obsessive condemnation of still unconfirmed Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election is a classic case of “do as I say, not as I do,” where the US politicians and media seem to have developed both long and short-term memory loss when it comes to American meddling in foreign elections. [...]