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After almost two years in recession, the country's rainy day fund has shrunk to just $32.2 billion this month, according to the Russian Finance Ministry. It was $91.7 billion in September 2014, just before oil prices started to collapse. And it's getting worse. Analysts expect the fund will shrink to just $15 billion by the end of this year and dry up completely soon after that.

Original Headline: Putin could have poisoned Hillary says world renowned doctor who exposed NFL concussion crisis and was played by Will Smith in Hollywood movie A world-renowned doctor has made the far-fetched suggestion Russia's President Vladimir Putin could be responsible for poisoning Hillary Clinton, who was diagnosed earlier this week with pneumonia. The 68-year-old Democratic candidate for the White House collapsed into the arms of her Secret Service agents on Sunday after being rushed from the 9/11 memorial service at the World Trade Centre. Dr Bennet Omalu, the doctor who exposed the NFL concussion crisis, tweeted: 'I must advice (sic)...

The last time Russia’s sole aircraft carrier sailed into the Mediterranean Sea, five years ago, the U.S. Navy’s 6th Fleet kept a close eye on its progress. The concern among American officers wasn’t the ship’s contingent of fighter planes; instead, it was the very real worry it would sink and necessitate a potentially risky rescue operation. The 26-year-old Admiral Kuznetsov made it through that 2011 deployment without sinking and is now headed back to the eastern Mediterranean this fall as part of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s effort to use Syria as a showcase for his new model military. But the...

Donald Trump’s praise of Vladimir Putin during the recent televised commander-in-chief forum has come in for widespread scorn, especially on the left, but also from some conservatives. The comments were perhaps politically ill-advised as they distracted attention from Hillary Clinton’s weaknesses and Trump’s better messages. But objectively, Trump’s observations, particularly his comparison of the relative effectiveness of Putin’s leadership to Barack Obama, are not obviously incorrect. Putin may be a ruthless, autocratic dictator, but he acts in ways that are clearly intended to promote Russia’s national interests. Obama on the other hand has consistently acted, and continues to act, in...

A group of Russian hackers claim to have found files showing the Williams sisters and gymnast Simone Biles were allowed to take banned substances by anti-doping bosses. Hacktivists Fancy Bears leaked documents that allegedly demonstrate both Venus and Serena Williams took substances that were on the World Anti-Doping Agency's (WADA) banned list. However, the International Tennis Federation said the Williams sisters had been given permission to use the drugs for 'therapeutic use'. Fancy Bears claimed American gymnast Simone Biles tested positive for another banned substance in August but also had special dispensation to use it. Both the International Federation of...

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump criticized U.S. foreign policy and the American political press corps Thursday during an interview on RT America, a state-owned Russian television network. In a wide-ranging interview that aired Thursday evening, Trump spoke with journalist Larry King about the presidential race, American intervention in Iraq and the Middle East, and the potential intrusion by Russian hackers into Democratic Party databases. RT, which airs in several countries in English and Russian, is funded by the Russian government; though it characterizes itself as independent, the network has been regularly accused of pro-Kremlin bias. The interview came as Trump...

The Syrian cease-fire agreement that US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced Friday night, September 9, in Geneva hands Syrian affairs over to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and the country’s military. The accord marked a sharp reversal for Washington. In his meeting with Putin in China last week, US President Barack Obama did not agree to those steps for the simple reason that such an agreement would be in line with the policy and stance of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, not those of the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Trump suggested several months ago...

Russia and the US have agreed to a "cessation of hostilities" in Syria from sunset on 12 September after intensive talks in Geneva. Under the plan, the Syrian government will end combat missions in specified areas held by the opposition. Russia and the US will establish a joint centre to combat so-called Islamic State and al-Nusra fighters. The plan follows a day of talks between US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov.

Kerry working closely with Russia to work together for a ceasefire in Syria.... Sounds like what Trump was talking about only to be attacked for his remarks about Russia and Putin.

Russia spent 18.4 percent of its reserve fund in a single month to plug deficits in the federal budget, Finance Ministry figures released Tuesday have revealed. The country’s reserve fund fell from $38.18 billion to $32.2 billion during the course of August 2016, shrinking to just over a third of pre-crisis levels, reports The Moscow Times. The fund stood at $90 billion in late 2014, but has come under increasing strain as Russia’s oil-dependent economy has suffered under falling energy prices. Russia has been somewhat cushioned to the fall in oil prices as the commodity is sold in dollars and...

“The beauty of the American voting system is that it is dispersed among the 50 states, and it is clunky as heck,’’ Comey said, according to The Wall Street Journal. “A lot of people have found that challenging over the years, but the beauty of that is it’s not exactly a swift part of the internet of things, and so it is hard for an actor to reach our voting process.’’

While in command, the top U.S. general in Europe said President Obama looked at NATO as a warmonger “worry” and “threat” rather than an alliance trying to keep the peace, retired Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, who retired in May, wrote a 2014 series of emails to a think tank official in Washington. The four-star general bemoaned what it was like trying to work with the White House at a time when Vladimir Putin’s troops had invaded Ukraine and was trying to rattle other former Soviet Union puppet states. The emails were acquired by DCLeaks, a new site which earlier...

If Hillary Clinton is elected president, the world will remember Aug. 25 as the day she began the Second Cold War. In a speech last month nominally about Donald Trump, Clinton called Russian President Vladimir Putin the godfather of right-wing, extreme nationalism. To Kremlin-watchers, those were not random epithets. Two years earlier, in the most famous address of his career, Putin accused the West of backing an armed seizure of power in Ukraine by “extremists, nationalists, and right-wingers.” Clinton had not merely insulted Russia’s president: She had done so in his own words. Worse, they were words originally directed at...

The opening segment of today’s Morning Joe was a Niagara of negativity deluging Donald Trump, focused on his comments at the Commander-in-Chief Forum. No discussion of Hillary Clinton’s newest lies about her email, and the fact that, in order to create a veil of secrecy for her Foundation malfeasance, she subverted our national security. Two examples of the extreme hostility toward Trump, coupled with a dose of Hillary-worship. Ad man Donny Deutsch detected “envy” of Putin by Trump, saying “I think he wants to be a dictator.” A bit later, Mika Brzezinski sympathized with poor Hillary: she’s so “incredibly prepared”...

“We had the enjoyable quasi-grilling of Hillary on the emails, and Trump had a strong performance,” Dr. Sebastian Gorka said of Wednesday night’s national-security forum, on Thursday morning’s Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM. Gorka suggested Trump “may have been playing with us a little bit” with his positive comments about Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was a Soviet spy in Damascus in the 1980s, Israel’s Channel 1 television reported Wednesday, citing information it said was included in an archive smuggled out of the USSR. According to Channel 1’s foreign news editor Oren Nahari, the famed Mitrokhin archive, kept by KGB defector Vasily Mitrokhin, revealed that Abbas was a Soviet mole in Damascus in 1983. The documents — obtained by Israeli researchers Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez — purportedly show that Abbas, code-named Krotov (mole), was involved with the Soviets while Mikhail Bogdanov, today Vladimir Putin’s envoy to the Middle East....

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi urged Speaker Paul Ryan on Tuesday to keep Republican candidates from using hacked Democratic documents in this year’s election campaigns, the latest political twist in a summer of revelations of digital break-ins believed linked to Russia. “Russia’s cyber attack is an unprecedented assault on the sanctity of our democratic process,” Pelosi, D-Calif., wrote in a letter to the Wisconsin Republican. “We must come together to say that defending our democracy from Russia’s meddling is more important than any advantage or disadvantage in this election.” A GOP aide said Ryan cannot control campaign ads by Republican...

Ninety-nine years ago, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, and, after a few months of weak parliamentary rule, the Bolsheviks seized power. We call that seizure the Russian (or October) Revolution, but it might better be designated the Bolshevik coup d’état. A party of 10,000 people gained control of an empire occupying one-sixth of the earth’s land area. From the start, they made up for their small numbers with outsized violence. If at first their executions of liberals, socialists, workers who showed independence, and peasants from whom grain was seized at gunpoint seemed like a short-term necessity, it soon became evident that...

On 6 September 1976, an aircraft appears out of the clouds near the Japanese city of Hakodate, on the northern island of Hokkaido. It’s a twin-engined jet, but not the kind of short-haul airliner Hakodate is used to seeing. This huge, grey hulk sports the red stars of the Soviet Union. No-one in the West has ever seen one before. The jet lands on Hakodate’s concrete-and-asphalt runway. The runway, it turns out, is not long enough. The jet ploughs through hundreds of feet of earth before it finally comes to rest at the far end of the airport. The pilot...

Hillary Clinton Accuses Russia of Interfering With U.S. Election By AMY CHOZICKSEPT. 5, 2016 MOLINE, Ill. — Hillary Clinton accused Russian intelligence of interfering with the American election, implying that President Vladimir V. Putin viewed a victory by Donald J. Trump as a destabilizing event that would weaken the United States and buttress Russian interests. “It’s almost unthinkable,” Mrs. Clinton said on Monday, referring to what she called recent “credible reports about Russian interference in our elections” and citing a hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s emails in July. “We’ve never had the nominee of one of our major parties...