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The Trump administration on Dec. 3 added China’s top chipmaker, SMIC, and oil giant CNOOC to a blacklist of companies tied to the Chinese military. The Department of Defense designated a total of four additional companies as owned or controlled by the Chinese military, including China Construction Technology Co Ltd and China International Engineering Consulting Corp. The move, first reported by Reuters on Sunday, takes to 35 the total number of blacklisted companies. While the list did not initially trigger any penalties, a recent executive order by President Donald Trump will prevent U.S. investors from buying the firms’ securities from...

Donald Trump has doubled down on his threat to veto a $740bn (£549bn) defence bill that does not include a repeal of protections for internet companies. Congressional negotiators reached a compromise deal on Thursday regarding the National Defense Authorisation Act (NDAA), which addresses pay for service members, troop levels and weapons procurement. The bill is expected to go to the House and Senate floors next week, where it will likely pass, before going to Mr Trump for final sign-off. But shortly before midnight on Thursday Mr Trump, in an angry late-night Twitter tirade, vowed to veto the legislation over its...

A U.S. Department of Justice lawyer argued Monday that the United States can kill its own citizens without judicial review when litigation would reveal state secrets. The argument drew alarm among judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Courthouse News Service reports. Judge Patricia Millett characterized the DOJ’s argument as giving the government the ability to “unilaterally decide to kill U.S. citizens,” according to coverage of the argument by Courthouse News Service. “Do you appreciate how extraordinary that proposition is?” The government’s brief in the case supplies details of the lawsuit. The plaintiff, Bilal...

How permanent an impact a Joe Biden presidency will have comes down almost entirely to what happens in the state of Georgia on Jan. 5, 2021.There’s no doubt a Joe Biden administration is going to have a massive impact on the United States. How permanent an impact it will have, however, comes down almost entirely to what happens in the state of Georgia on Jan. 5, 2021. Like all modern presidents, President Barack Obama used the power of the executive to his benefit, signing orders that ranged from granting amnesty to illegal immigrants to joining the Paris climate agreement. President...

If Donald Trump doesn’t take the Oath of Office on January 20, 2021, one principal but little-noted reason for this may be that he crossed one of the most powerful and least accountable forces in the nation: the military-industrial complex. As Trump said last September, “the top people in the Pentagon…want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy. But we’re getting out of the endless wars, you know how we’re doing.” Now, however, that Joe Biden has been anointed “President-elect”...

Jim Jeffrey, the United States’ retiring Special Representative to Syria and the special envoy in the fight against the Islamic State, confirmed Thursday that he and other senior administration officials routinely misled President Donald Trump on troop levels in the Middle East. Jeffrey, speaking to Defense One, explained how despite Trump’s stated promise to withdraw America from endless Middle Eastern engagements, he was able to convince the president to commit to keeping between 200 to 400 troops in the region in 2019 to “secure” oil fields held by U.S. allies and other strategic positions. (RELATED: Trump Performs ‘Near Total Decapitation’...

Newsdump Alert: Justice Department Report Says FBI Wanted To Arrest Jeffrey Epstein In 2007 But Was Vetoed By US Attorney in Miami Ahead Of Plea Deal With Feds.. More On This: Victim's Lawyers See 350-Page Justice Department Report As White Wash Of Justice Department Handling.. Let's start asking if the conditions of the 1876 Presidential Election can be replicated in the 21st Century... Me And Jeffrey Toobin (Warning: Disturbing Content Psychological Nudity) Man I wish I could have been as comfortable with the opposite sex as Dr. Hook was in that song performed as a hit in 1978. Back then...

Four years after signing the now-infamous “Never Trump” letter condemning then-presidential candidate Donald Trump as a danger to America, retiring diplomat Jim Jeffrey is recommending that the incoming Biden administration stick with Trump’s foreign policy in the Middle East. But even as he praises the president’s support of what he describes as a successful “realpolitik” approach to the region, he acknowledges that his team routinely misled senior leaders about troop levels in Syria. “We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” Jeffrey said in an interview. The actual number...

The decision by three Arab states to make peace with Israel can be credited both to efforts by the Trump administration and the recognition by these Sunni states that their security would improve against the ongoing threats they face from Turkey and Iran. Iran and its proxies interfere with Arab states while promoting their Shi’ite revolutionary ideology; likewise, Turkey pushes its Sunni revolutionary ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the region. Turkey and Iran look to overthrow the Sunni Arab states that do not align with them, such as Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. The normalization deals between the...

Custody of the Franciscans in Knayeh Two Franciscan friars describe their high-risk ministry in Syria's Idlib province in one of the country’s last jihadist strongholds. They convey the daily threat that weighs on them and on the flock of some three hundred Catholic families they assist at the risk of their lives. Fr. Hanna Jallouf is sixty-seven, Fr. Luai Bsharat is forty. These two Franciscans are the last priests to minister in the province of Idlib, near the border between Turkey and western Syria. The two sons of St. Francis bring spiritual help to three hundred families who are...

The message was clearly aimed at Gulf states and others that are partnered with the US. Iran has sought to reach out to its Arab neighbors, with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif warning them that US President Donald Trump will be leaving in 70 days, but Iran’s regime will remain “forever.” He urged them to realize that “betting on outsiders to provide security is never a good gamble.” In Arabic and English, he called for dialogue and to work together. The message was clearly aimed at Gulf states and others that are partnered with the US. Iran was offering them...

Israeli Settlements Minister Tzachi Hanegbi warns that a Biden presidency could ignite war in the Middle East, while Egypt fears Biden would aid the resurgence of Islamists in the region. Hanegbi pointed out that Biden has indicated he will resurrect America’s nuclear agreement with Iran which was cancelled by the Trump administration. For Israel, this would represent an existential threat to national security and drastically increase the chances of war with Tehran. “If Biden stays with that policy, there will, in the end, be a violent confrontation between Israel and Iran,” said Hanegbi. Meanwhile, other Middle Eastern countries such as...

Welcome to the weekend and here we are still doing it the way we've always done it whether the "trolls" like it or not. Wake up and smell the coffee about certain realities the coronavirus situation and restrictions related to it likely to be tightened in the face of the numbers but the election situation perhaps giving the governors being told by Washington and people like Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci a pause... Newsdump Update: US Syria Envoy Says His Mission Ending But US Policy Will Stay The Same If Biden Is President... The Establishment policy is set...

A Syrian mercenary recently captured while fighting for Azerbaijan against Armenia in its ongoing war over Nagorno-Karabakh said on Wednesday that his recruiters instructed him and fellow mercenaries to “slaughter all civilians and soldiers” of an Armenian village they attempted to capture. Armenian forces captured Syrian national Yusuf Alaabet al-Hajji in recent days and “is currently remanded into custody facing international terrorism charges, among others,” Armenian state news agency Armenpress reported on Wednesday. Hajji told Armenian investigators that Turkish forces recruited him in Syria to fight for Azerbaijan for “a 2000-dollar monthly payment.” In his testimony, Hajji detailed how Turkish...

Jihadist groups are believed to have been present in Azerbaijan since at least February, it was claimed on Oct. 27, with Turkey accused of shipping in militia, including a Uyghur Muslim terror group, the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP). The Islamist fighters are thought to have been mobilized from their bases in Syria to join Azeri forces in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, where they are fighting against Armenia. Despite Turkey initially denying the presence of the jihadists, film footage and photographs have since corroborated reports which began circulating in the Syrian press in August. The mobilization of Turkish troops was reported in...

A cross has been ripped down from a Greek Orthodox Church in a part of Syria controlled by U.S.-backed militants. The St. Sergius and Bacchus Greek Orthodox Church in the city of Tabqa near Raqqa had radical Islamists remove the cross after Friday’s Islamic prayers in a local mosque. Although commentators refer to this action as part of an anti-France protest, it clearly shows that it is anti-Christian as a Greek Orthodox Church was targeted in a city controlled by the Kurdish-led and U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces. The Tabqa Regional government, acting independently from the legitimate government in Damascus, restored...

The United States announces that it killed seven senior leaders of Al-Qaeda in Syria in an air strike last week as they were meeting near Idlib, US Central Command announced on Monday. Central Command spokeswoman, Major Beth Riordan, said the strike was conducted on 22 October. The leaders were not identified. “The removal of these AQ-S leaders will disrupt the terrorist organization’s ability to further plot and carryout global attacks threatening U.S. citizens, our partners, and innocent civilians,” Riordan said. “With our allies and partners, we will continue to target al Qaida and other terrorist organisations.” she added. According to...

The photographs from the Turkish occupation zone Serêkaniyê (Arab. Ras al-Ain) in northern Syria basically confirm only once again what the autonomous administration and human rights organizations have long denounced: The terrorist militia "Islamic State" (IS) is one of the proxy troops of NATO partner Turkey acting for Ankara in Syria. The footage, which has been circulating on online networks such as Twitter and Facebook since Sunday, shows "demonstrators" in Serêkaniyê protesting against French President Emmanuel Macron. In early October Macron had presented his law against Islamist separatism and announced that his country would increasingly counteract the development of...

Russian air strikes in northern Syria have killed more than 50 Turkish-backed militia fighters in the mainly rebel-held province of Idlib, reports say. Many others were wounded in the attack, which marks an escalation of violence in the region. A training base for an Islamist group called Faylaq al-Sham was hit. The assault puts at risk a ceasefire in Idlib, brokered and monitored by Russia and Turkey, which back opposite sides in the war. UK-based monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put the number of dead at 78.

Two ‘Beatles’ charged with hostage-taking of American citizens in Syria and other terrorism offenses that resulted in the deaths of James Wright Foley, Steven Joel Sotloff, Peter Edward Kassig, and Kayla Jean Mueller Two militant fighters for the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a foreign terrorist organization, are expected to arrive in the United States today in FBI custody on charges related to their participation in a brutal hostage-taking scheme that resulted in the deaths of four American citizens, as well as the deaths of British and Japanese nationals, in Syria.Former British citizens Alexanda Amon Kotey, 36,...