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HELSINKI, Finland — Seeking to shine some light into the dark world of Internet trolls, a journalist with Finland’s national broadcaster asked members of her audience to share their experience of encounters with Russia’s “troll army,” a raucous and often venomous force of online agitators. The response was overwhelming, though not in the direction that the journalist, Jessikka Aro, had hoped. As she expected, she received some feedback from people who had clashed with aggressively pro-Russian voices online. But she was taken aback, and shaken, by a vicious retaliatory campaign of harassment and insults against her and her work by...

<p>If there's a single issue on which the U.S. and Russia should urgently cooperate, it's Saudi Arabia.</p> <p>If the Central Intelligence Agency's role is to discreetly promote the economic and political interests of the United States, then there's one country that ought to be awfully disappointing to the agency right now: Saudi Arabia. In fact, if there's an issue on which America and Russia could potentially agree, it would be the damage Saudi Arabia has recently wrought upon the national and economic security of both nations.</p>

Russia helped annihilate the jihadis after Putin made a U-turn over his ceasefire decision. And with the help of Russia airstrikes the Syrian army had been gaining ground for several days. Putin's men hit 158 targets and annihilated more than 100 militants, according to the Russian ministry of defence. Military sources said the army have “full control” of the city known for its beautiful archeology. Syrian officials yesterday released pictures showing helicopters and tanks blasting ISIS targets. The sick terror cult seized the Unesco World Heritage site in May last year and smashed two 2,000-year-old temples and detonated dynamite blasting...

Donald Trump would consider allowing Japan and South Korea to build their own nuclear arsenals instead of depending on the U.S. for their protection against North Korea and China, he said in an interview with The New York Times published Saturday. “There’ll be a point at which we’re just not going to be able to do it anymore,” Trump said, pointing at what he calls a “severely depleted” military. “We have nuclear arsenals which are in very terrible shape,” he said. “They don’t even know if they work.” “If the United States keeps on its path, its current path of...

If you want to know why we have a $19 trillion national debt and a fiscal structure that will take that already staggering figure to $35 trillion and 140% of GDP within a decade, just consider the latest campaign fracas. That is, the shrieks of disbelief in response to Donald Trump’s sensible suggestion that the Europeans pay for their own defense. The fact is, NATO has been an obsolete waste for 25 years. Yet the denizens of the Imperial City cannot even seem to grasp that the 4 million Red Army is no more; and that the Soviet Empire, which...

Why — and how — Russia won in Syria By Josh Cohen March 15, 2016 Here’s what Russia achieved — and why it was so successful. First — and most importantly — Russian bombing turned the tide of the war in Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s favor. Second, Putin recently achieved an important diplomatic objective by forcing the United States to acknowledge that Russia plays a key role in determining Syria’s future. Third, Putin responded to Turkey’s shoot down of a Russian jet by humiliating Ankara, an emerging rival in the Middle East and Central Asia. Putin also grievously wounded Turkey’s...

President Barack Obama will use an historic speech in Havana next week to lay out a vision of greater freedoms and more economic opportunity in Cuba, White House officials said Wednesday, offering a glimpse of how the president hopes to use his trip to encourage change on the communist island. Obama’s speech on Tuesday at the Grand Theater of Havana will mark a moment that seemed unimaginable only a few years ago, before Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro moved to restore relations between the two estranged countries. Obama’s advisers said they hoped Cubans would be able to watch the...

A group of United Nations' member-states on Thursday elected the Assad regime to a leadership post of a special committee dealing with decolonization, sparking protests from a human rights group that had earlier urged U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon to intervene. At a meeting in New York, the committee's newly-elected chairman, Venezuelan ambassador Rafael Ramirez, asked the member-states whether there were any objections to putting forward Syrian ambassador Bashar Ja'afari as its "rapporteur" for the coming year. Hearing no objectives, Ramirez declared Ja'afari -- as well as three nominated vice chairmen, the representatives of Cuba, Sierra Leone and Indonesia -- "elected...

Philip Hammond must be in the running for the stupid award and taking it very seriously indeed. Literally everything that comes out of his mouth has us stunned at how could anyone be as ignorant, petulant and ill-informed. His latest: "What we have seen over the last weeks is very disturbing evidence of coordination between Syrian Kurdish forces, the Syrian regime and the Russian air force which are making us distinctly uneasy about the Kurds' role in all of this." Oh really? What evidence would that be? The fact that Russians have been acting as the Kurds' air force, which...

Syria Rebels Face Collapse as Thousands Flee North Aleppo (Video) Posted on Feb 8, 2016 By Juan Cole On Friday, the Syrian Arab Army and its Hizbullah and Iranian/ Afghan allies made further progress in taking the area just north of Aleppo. They were apparently mainly fighting al-Qaeda, which had a stronghold in the city of Ratyan. The Russians subjected it to intensive bombing and the SAA and allies ultimately took it. Al-Qaeda (the Nusrah Front) said it had killed 25 of its attackers. In New York, as the Syrian peace talks collapsed, the Russian envoy asked out loud why...

Senior Pentagon officials on Wednesday sought to defend the use of Russian-made rocket engines to send U.S. military satellites into space, telling exasperated lawmakers they are moving quickly to end the practice and rely on American-made rockets for the launches. But Air Force Secretary Deborah James and Pentagon acquisition chief Frank Kendall failed to stem sharp criticism from several members of the Senate Armed Services Committee who view Russia as the chief geopolitical threat to the United States. Led by the committee chairman, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., they said using the Russian engines enriches President Vladimir Putin's inner circle and...

Ed Schultz, the progressive talk radio host and former MSNBC personality, has landed at RT America -- the Kremlin-backed cable news channel that has been criticized for advocating a pro-Russian agenda.

Below are the key figures for Russian Federation population in 2015: 1,932,227 live births 1,907,361 deaths Natural increase: 24 866 people Net migration: 76 060 people

It's said that some people will believe anything. And that's what Guardian editors must be thinking, based on their latest story on the Litvinenko affair. It's titled "Fresh Evidence Suggests Litvinenko Was Killed to Keep Him Quiet." Here's what the Guardian wants its readers to believe: 1. Some bad actor (widely expected to be the Russian state according to the Guardian) wanted to "prevent [Litvinenko] from testifying about Vladimir Putin’s links with Russian organized crime." 2. That there is now added "credence to the theory that eliminating Litvinenko was a matter of utmost urgency for the Kremlin." 3. "Amateur killers"...

Britain will lose out on more than $1 billion in planned investment in Scottish golf resorts if it bans Donald Trump from entering the country, the Republican presidential candidate's company said on Wednesday. It also warned that the millions of Americans who support Trump would be alienated by such a move. The Trump Organization issued the caution after a parliamentary committee on Tuesday set a January 18 date for a House of Commons debate on the issue. A petition on the Commons website calling for Trump to be barred has drawn more than 570,700 signatures -- well over the 100,000...

<p>Putin is Israelis’ person of the year, according to a Panels Research poll taken for The Jerusalem Post and its Hebrew sister publication Ma’ariv Sof Hashavua.</p>

In American politics the nation of Russia, especially as personified in its leader Vladimir Putin, becomes all things to all men.To American leftists, Russia is a neo-fascist, violently nationalist country that ruthlessly suppressed minority groups, especially homosexuals. To the American Right, Putin is the second coming of Stalin who is working to subvert good old-fashioned American values around the world.In line with the latter narrative, a certain Christian Gomez recently published an article on The New American website, the flagship of the John Birch Society, supposedly revealing that the Russian government is the real power behind the ISIS terrorist group,...

Shoot down a Russian plane, Putin says, “I’m done with you!”

Russian President Vladimir Putin has arrived in Tehran for talks with Iranian leaders about the crisis in Syria. On his first trip to Iran in eight years, Putin met with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Monday, as Russia nears a third month of military engagement in the conflict. The discussions come on a sidelines of a one-day trip to Iran for a summit of gas-exporting countries. Tehran and Moscow have supported Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the ongoing civil war that has crippled the country since 2011 and killed over 250,000 people. The violence has displaced millions more. On...

The Russian Defense Ministry denies US allegations that Russian warplanes in Syria are bombing regions, which are out of President Assad’s control, rather than terrorist infrastructure, Russian Defense Ministry Spokesperson Igor Konashenkov said on Thursday. He explained that US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland told Congress hearings held earlier that the Russian air group in Syria delivered most of its strikes at regions which were no longer under the control of President Assad’s regime rather than at terrorists. "If we analyze what various US officials say, there is an impression that the location of terrorist-held facilities is the most...