Russia will deliver liquefied natural gas (LNG) to the US, Kommersant daily reports. The reason for the deal is the sharp rise in gas prices on the east coast of the US.

An LNG tanker belonging to French energy company Engie is now shipping from the British port of Isle of Grain to an American terminal, Everett, located near Boston.

The gas being shipped is from Russia's Yamal LNG plant, according to the newspaper. The tanker is due to arrive in the US on January 22.

The furore over the last week about Michael Wolff's book about the first months of the Trump administration might mislead some people into thinking that something important actually happened.

This could not be more wrong. Wolff's book - which has now appeared on the internet in electronic format- is not even a punctuation mark in the history of the Trump Presidency. It is a blank space which will be forgotten in a few weeks.

The book tells us precisely nothing of any value about the Trump Presidency save for one thing, which has not been reported anywhere that I know of because it is so completely contrary to what so many people have been saying about Donald Trump and his rise to the Presidency for so long.

This is that the book shows that the allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians which are the subject of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's inquiry must be untrue and that no one in the White House takes them seriously.

He left Air Force Two behind and, unannounced, "shrouded in secrecy," flew on an unmarked C-17 transport plane into Bagram Air Base, the largest American garrison in Afghanistan. All news of his visit was embargoed until an hour before he was to depart the country.

More than 16 years after an American invasion "liberated" Afghanistan, he was there to offer some good news to a U.S. troop contingent once again on the rise. Before a 40-foot American flag, addressing 500 American troops, Vice President Mike Pence praised them as "the world's greatest force for good," boasted that American air strikes had recently been "dramatically increased," swore that their country was "here to stay," and insisted that "victory is closer than ever before." As an observer noted, however, the response of his audience was "subdued." ("Several troops stood with their arms crossed or their hands folded behind their backs and listened, but did not applaud.")

Russiagaters allege, with no evidence, that "Russia attacked America" in 2016, but many Russians believe-with reasonable cause-that the US has been attacking their country for 25 years.

Professor Emeritus of Politics and Russian Studies (at Princeton and NYU) Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (Previous installments, now in their fourth year, are at TheNation.com.)

Cohen's subject is both contemporary and historical. The most central, ramifying, and dangerous allegation of Russiagate is that "Russian attacked American democracy" during the 2016 presidential election. After 18 months, there is still no credible evidence for this allegation. On the other hand, many Russians - in the policy elite, the educated middle class, and ordinary citizens - believe that "the United States has been at war with Russia" for 25 years, a perception regularly expressed in the Russian media. They believe this for understandable reasons.

American commentators attribute such views to "Kremlin propaganda." It is true, Cohen points out, that Russians, like Americans, are strongly influenced by what appears in the media, especially on television, and that Russian television news reporting and commentary are no less politicized than their US counterparts. But elite and middle-class Russians are no less informed and critical-minded than American ones. Indeed, they have more access to daily American news and opinions - from cable and satellite TV, US-funded Russian-language broadcasts and Internet sites, and from Russian sites, such as inosmi.ru, that translate scores of American media articles into Russian daily - than most Americans have to Russian media. (The recent censoring steps taken by the Department of Justice against RT and Sputnik might be viewed in this context.) Generally, Cohen argues, many more Russians are much better informed about Washington politics than Americans are about Moscow politics.

The riots and protests in Iran continue for a 6th day. While "western" media claim that the protests are growing I see no evidence for that in the various videos that appear online. The legitimate protests over price rises, failing private banks and against the new neoliberal austerity budget of President Rouhani were hijacked early on by rioting gangs. These are obviously coordinated from the outside of the country through various internet applications, especially Telegram and Instagram:

Amad News, a channel on Telegram, appears to have played a pivotal role in the wave of protests. Reportedly administered by exiled journalist Rohollah Zam - a son of a senior Reformist cleric said to have escaped the country after being accused of having links with foreign intelligence agencies ...

Blocking the specific control channels proved to be insufficient:

Special software used to circumvent the government filters could still be downloaded easily. And on Monday, as on other days, there were calls for protests online and on foreign-based Persian-language satellite channels.

The blockage of the internet applications was lifted today.

The totality of the evidence undermines the Times' collusion narrative.

"Trump Adviser's Visit to Moscow Got the F.B.I.'s Attention." That was the page-one headline the New York Times ran on April 20, 2017, above its breathless report that "a catalyst for the F.B.I. investigation into connections between Russia and President Trump's campaign" was a June 2016 visit to Moscow by Carter Page.

It was due to the Moscow trip by Page, dubbed a "foreign policy adviser" to the campaign, that "the F.B.I. obtained a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court" in September - i.e., during the stretch run of the presidential campaign.

According to the Chinese zodiac, 2017 has been the Year of the Rooster. Myself, I've decided to designate it the Year of the Headless Liberal Chicken. I don't mean that to be insulting ... or, all right, I guess I do, a little. But my heart goes out to liberals, seriously. At this point, the amount of utterly baseless, contradictory propaganda, mass hysteria, and just flat out insanity the ruling classes have demanded they swallow is more than any human mind, no matter how medicated, could possibly handle. Is it any wonder so many of them of lost it and started seeing Nazis and Russians coming out of the woodwork? Just consider what the average liberal has been forced to try to cognitively reconcile since the tragic events of last November ...

First came the overwhelming shock of Hillary Clinton's loss to Trump, a repulsive, word salad-babbling buffoon with absolutely no political experience who the media had been portraying to liberals as the Second Coming of Adolf Hitler. This was a candidate, let's recall, who jabbered about building a "beautiful wall" to protect us from the hordes of "Mexican rapists" and other "bad hombres" who were invading America, and who had boasted about grabbing women "by the pussy" like a prepubescent 6th grade boy. While he had served as a perfect foil for Clinton, and had provided hours of entertainment in a comic book villain kind of way, the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency was inconceivable in the minds of liberals. So, when it happened, it was like the Martians had invaded.

On Tuesday 19th December 2017 it was the turn of Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe to give evidence about Russiagate behind closed doors to the House Intelligence Committee. Judging by this report on Fox News the Republican members of the Committee found it a frustrating experience

Congressional investigators tell Fox News that Tuesday's seven-hour interrogation of Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe contained numerous conflicts with the testimony of previous witnesses, prompting the Republican majority staff of the House Intelligence Committee to decide to issue fresh subpoenas next week on Justice Department and FBI personnel....

"It's hard to know who's telling us the truth," said one House investigator after McCabe's questioning....

Sources close to the investigation say that McCabe was a "friendly witness" to the Democrats in the room, who are said to have pressed the deputy director, without success, to help them build a case against President Trump for obstruction of justice in the Russia-collusion probe. "If he could have, he would have," said one participant in the questioning.

Investigators say McCabe recounted to the panel how hard the FBI had worked to verify the contents of the anti-Trump "dossier" and stood by its credibility. But when pressed to identify what in the salacious document the bureau had actually corroborated, the sources said, McCabe cited only the fact that Trump campaign adviser Carter Page had traveled to Moscow. Beyond that, investigators said, McCabe could not even say that the bureau had verified the dossier's allegations about the specific meetings Page supposedly held in Moscow....

The sources said that when asked when he learned that the dossier had been funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, McCabe claimed he could not recall - despite the reported existence of documents with McCabe's own signature on them establishing his knowledge of the dossier's financing and provenance. (bold italics added)

The key words are the ones I have highlighted and they go to the heart of the FBI's - and Robert Mueller's - problem.

Shortly after the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, made a candid confession to the Army Times, "I'm running out of demons, I'm running out of villains. I'm down to Castro and Kim Il Sung." Amid the general bonhomie of the military interview, Powell nicely encapsulated a central truth of empire: it doesn't want peace. Never did. Imperialism, the monopoly stage of capitalism, is based on conquest. Peace is little more than an aftermath in the imperialist vision. It is the dusty rubble-strewn silence that descends on Aleppo when the jihadists have been bussed out. It is the silent pollution of the Danube when the NATO jets have flown. Peace is an interlude between the birth of avarice and the advent of aggression. Little else.

If Powell confessed empire's disinterest in peace, he also expressed the need of the imperials state for a steady supply of new enemies. Conflict is the lifeblood of imperial capitalism. It is how the ruling class further enriches itself. It is how the global elite expand their dominion over the planet. Those who will not pay tribute under threat of menace, must ultimately face the menace. But this truth, that the imperial state is the carmine tip of elite expropriation, must not be aired among the hoi polloi. It is the unseemly underbelly of power and if it were widely understood it would hack away the legitimacy of the state, which is only justified by its nominal commitment to the welfare of the nation. That claim only appears legitimate in the face of some grim and ghastly threat. Powell understood that with the nasty specter of the evil empire crumbling to ash on an Asian plain, a spine-chilling new antagonist would have to be invented to replace it.

Almost eighteen months after Obama's Justice Department and the FBI launched the Russiagate investigation, and seven months after Special Counsel Robert Mueller took the investigation over, the sum total of what it has achieved is as follows:

(1) an indictment of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates which concerns entirely their prior financial dealings, and which makes no reference to the Russiagate collusion allegations;

(2) an indictment for lying to the FBI of George Papadopoulos, the junior volunteer staffer of the Trump campaign, who during the 2016 Presidential election had certain contacts with members of a Moscow based Russian NGO, which he sought to pass off - falsely and unsuccessfully - as more important than they really were, and which also does not touch on the Russiagate collusion allegations; and

(3) an indictment for lying to the FBI of Michael Flynn arising from his perfectly legitimate and entirely legal contacts with the Russian ambassador after the 2016 Presidential election, which also does not touch on the Russiagate collusion allegations, and which looks as if it was brought about by an act of entrapment.

Of actual evidence to substantiate the claims of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the election Mueller has so far come up with nothing.

Here I wish to say something briefly about the nature of "collusion".