During a visit to Estonia on December 21, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that he believes NATO has been the most successful military alliance of the past 500 years and that it has a "great future."​
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The prime minister, whose Conservative Party won a resounding victory in parliamentary elections this month, also said he hoped to improve relations with Russia but that the two nations had "terrible problems" separating them.​
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Johnson made the comments in an interview with Estonia's ERR News during a trip to meet with the 850 British soldiers serving in the Baltic country.​
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Britain, the United States, and their allies have been rotating troops through fellow NATO members Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland since Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in March 2014.​

Ankara will "absolutely" not turn its back on the two security agreements it signed with the Tripoli-based government in Libya, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said. He promised to boost support to the Government of National Accord (GNA), which is recognized by the UN, if necessary, with ground, air and maritime options to be considered.

The statement comes at a crucial moment in the Libyan conflict as General Khalifa Haftar from the rivaling Tobruk government is advancing on Tripoli in an attempt to unify power. The North African state remains split since the 2011 uprising and NATO intervention which led to the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi and the devastation of a once rich country.

On Saturday, the Turkish parliament ratified the military cooperation and maritime boundaries deals, signed between Ankara and Tripoli in late November. The agreements provide for intelligence sharing, while also allowing the GNA to request vehicles and weapons from Turkey to be used to defend itself. The launch of a "quick reaction force" on the request of the Libyan side was also agreed.

The terms of the deal go against the arms embargo, which was placed by the UN on Libya eight years ago.

Moscow has made it clear that it is ready to extend the landmark 2010 treaty aimed at reducing US and Russian nuclear arsenals at any time, leaving Washington with no excuse to obstruct its renewal, Russian FM Sergey Lavrov said.

The US claimed that Russia was hampering the prolongation of the 2010 edition of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) by asking "some questions about how the Americans are fulfilling their obligations," the foreign minister told Russia's Channel 1.

But President Vladimir Putin recently proclaimed Moscow is ready to extend it immediately and without preconditions. "Now this ambiguity is removed, and our American colleagues no longer have any excuses."

Moscow is hoping that Washington "will react in a constructive way," because "we are committed to renewing the START Treaty in a bilateral context."

Signed by the US and Russia in 2010, the treaty restricts the development and deployment of nuclear weapons and the means of their delivery. It is expected to expire in early 2021, but there is still no sign that Washington will renew it.

Italian prosecutors believe Joseph Mifsud, the Maltese professor who started Russiagate is 'almost certainly dead.'

Joseph Mifsud approached Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos in the spring of 2016 and tried to plant dirt on him by claiming the Russians had Hillary Clinton's 'missing' State Department emails. Comey claimed Mifsud was a Russian spy, however, it is believed that Mifsud was working for the FBI or CIA as an informant sent to spy on Trump's camp.

Mifsud hasn't been heard from or seen since the spring of 2018.

Italian news outlet Il Giornale suggested that according to sources within the Agrigento Public Prosecution office, Mifsud is believed to be dead:

"But who was Mifsud? And what did he do? Until 2013, the Maltese professor was president of the university center of Agrigento. In its management, however, something went wrong: budget holes and crazy expenses risked killing the institution. For this reason, the Agrigento prosecutor has launched an investigation against him. But there has been no trace of Mifsud since 31 October 2017 and now, as highlighted on InsideOver, a tragic suspect is winding through the corridors of the Agrigento court: Mifsud may be dead. A hypothesis that prosecutor's sources believe '80%' true: "The chances that he died confirm by the court are very high."

Every now and again the CIA does its best to appear relatable, and every time the agency gets put back in its place. Now, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden hijacked a festive tweet to slam the CIA's torture practices.

"It's *snow secret* that we love winter," the clandestine agency tweeted on Saturday, marking the first day of winter in the US.

Snowden was acerbic in his response. "It's *snow secret* that you tortured Gul Rahman for weeks at a black site, then chained him naked to a concrete floor until he died in the near-winter cold," he tweeted.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani appears set to win a second term after Afghan election officials announced he had won 50.6 percent of the preliminary vote count. Hawa Alam Nuristani, chairwoman of the Independent Election Commission, made the announcement at a press conference on December 22 in the capital, Kabul.

Results for the September 28 presidential poll have been repeatedly delayed amid accusations of misconduct and technical problems with counting ballots.

The United Nations and the United States welcomed the announcement of the preliminary results.

Ghani's main challenger, Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, won 39.5 percent of the vote, Nuristani said, adding that the results can still be challenged. A spokesman for Ghani welcomed the preliminary results, while a spokesman for Abdullah rejected them.

The U.S. attorney investigating the origins of the intelligence community's investigation into Russia's 2016 meddling, and President Trump's connection to it, has a new target: former CIA Director John Brennan.

John Durham, the federal prosecutor hand-picked by Attorney General William Barr to look into misconduct in the FBI's counterintelligence investigation, has reportedly asked for Brennan's emails, call logs, and other documents, according to three officials briefed on the matter.

The report confirms what has long been speculated: The deep-rooted irresponsibility uncovered by Inspector General Michael Horowitz extends far beyond the FBI, and Brennan had something to do with it. In fact, it's possible Brennan led the FBI down the rabbit hole that was the Russia hoax, feeding the agency foreign intelligence while distancing himself from the problematic Steele dossier.

If you want the United States to get richer, our economy to become more efficient, and jobs to proliferate across borders, you should support expanding international free trade with our neighbors, Canada and Mexico. This means you should not support the new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement just passed by the House of Representatives. The hodgepodge of new trade restrictions and updates to trade policies is commonly known as the USMCA.

The USMCA trade deal was negotiated by the Trump administration as a replacement for the 1994 deal known as NAFTA, which eliminated tariffs, taxes on imports, for most products between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. The USMCA is a purported "upgrade" to NAFTA, and it mostly preserves the underlying zero-tariff framework. But many of the changes it does make are anti-trade, making its net value not an improvement from the current NAFTA status quo.

One needs to understand why free trade is a good thing in the first place. It's one of the rare issues where economists, liberal and conservative alike, pretty much all agree: Free trade is a net positive for all involved and makes the world richer.

This is because of an economic principle known as "comparative advantage." It's jargon that essentially means that unfettered trade allows all countries to focus their production on the industries where they are relatively more efficient. The net result is a more efficient economy for all, resulting in lower prices, increased employment, and renewed prosperity.

In his seminal work Basic Economics, the famed economist Thomas Sowell excoriated restrictions on trade, writing that "free trade provides economic benefits to all countries simultaneously, so trade restrictions reduce the efficiency of all countries simultaneously, lowering standards of living, without producing the increased employment that was hoped for."

This is why the USMCA is hot garbage: It would do more to restrict trade than liberalize it on balance, thus causing the kind of decline in efficiency and quality of life Sowell predicted.

From the start, Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, offered seemingly conflicting accounts of his office's alleged contact with the so-called whistleblower, as well as the timing of his knowledge of the so-called whistleblower's complaint.

Schiff also infamously misrepresented Trump's phone call with Ukraine's president during a public hearing meant to justify the impeachment inquiry, thereby misleading the country in a manner that even CNN's "fact-checker" found to be egregious.

And in a scandal almost entirely ignored by the news media, a staffer for Schiff's House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence took a trip to Ukraine sponsored by a Burisma-funded think-tank just days after the so-called whistleblower officially filed his August 12 complaint after first interacting with Schiff's office. Burisma, of course, is the natural gas company at the center of allegations regarding Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.

China's special envoy for Syria says the United States' pretext for extending its military presence in the Arab country, namely to protect Syrian oil fields, is untenable.

"Who have given the Americans the right to do this? And, at whose invitation is the US protecting Syria's oil fields?" Xie Xiaoyan said at a press conference in Moscow on Wednesday.

"Let's think the other way around: will the US allow Syria to send troops to US territory to protect oil fields there?" he said.

In late October, Washington reversed an earlier decision to pull out all of its troops from northeastern Syria, announcing the deployment of about 500 soldiers to the oil fields controlled by Kurdish forces in the Arab country.