UN Security Council Resolution 2254 calls for a "ceasefire" in Syria. A "ceasefire", unconditioned according to the resolution, would be for the whole country but would exclude certain groups:

[r]eiterates its call in resolution 2249 (2015) for Member States to prevent and suppress terrorist acts committed specifically by Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as Da'esh), Al-Nusra Front (ANF), and all other individuals, groups, undertakings, and entities associated with Al Qaeda or ISIL, and other terrorist groups, [...] and to eradicate the safe haven they have established over significant parts of Syria, and notes that the aforementioned ceasefire will not apply to offensive or defensive actions against these individuals, groups, undertakings and entities, as set forth in the 14 November 2015 ISSG Statement;

The resolution also underlines Syria's sovereignty. The UNSC is:

Reaffirming its strong commitment to the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic, and to the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, ...

The whole UNSC, including the U.S., France and Britain, agreed to this resolution.

Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump wrote an Op-Ed in support of waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques. It's not the first time he's spoken in favor of torture. While some fellow candidates agree with him, others do not.

Waterboarding was an "enhanced interrogation technique" employed in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. But the practice was eventually banned by the George W. Bush administration ‒ after it simulated drowning for its prisoners for years ‒ because waterboarding was deemed to be torture.

Most Republican candidates believe in some version of enhanced interrogation technique, while both Democratic candidates disagree.

On Monday, USA Today published an Op-Ed written by Trump about the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, which include practices such as electric shocks, dogs, nudity, hypothermia, mock executions and more. All of those techniques are specifically banned by the US Army Field Manual.

"Though the effectiveness of many of these methods may be in dispute, nothing should be taken off the table when American lives are at stake," Trump wrote. "The enemy is cutting off the heads of Christians and drowning them in cages, and yet we are too politically correct to respond in kind."

The Washington neocons have managed to muck things up in Syria blurring and confusing boundaries between who's who amongst warring factions in its now half decade old regime change proxy war that the US has been losing. With the US Empire's agenda to destabilize every potential threat to US-Israel hegemony in the region, the latest highly disturbing developments unfolding within this last week in Syria paint a very grim yet clear picture of America's revised regional strategy. The key lens by which to analyze and understand what the US Empire does geopolitically in the Middle East, North Africa or anywhere has everything to do with maintaining US-Israel regional hegemony and its obsessive, relentless strategy opposing the greatest threat to America's unipolar global hegemony - Russia, China and Iran. Underlying this neocon insanity behind US foreign policy's global agenda has been destabilization of the entire world through chaos and destruction militarily achieved through either direct Empire invasion-occupation war or more recently indirectly through the latest installment of Empire's manufactured war on terror deploying its created ISIS-al Qaeda terrorists as proxy war allies doing Empire's blood-soaked bidding by proxy. But when that strategy fails as it has in Syria recently, now the neocons are resorting to sending in its Islamic nation state puppets Turkey and Saudi Arabia as yet more proxy war allies to do yet more of their dirty work.

Consistent with control over the geopolitics chessboard is the imperialistic self-interest of controlling the earth's money, drug and oil supply also designed to promote war while isolating and weakening America's manufactured cold war 2 enemies of the East - Russia and Iran - that includes reversing a thwarted US Empire pipeline strategy. Assad's rejection in 2010 of Qatar's proposed gas pipeline through Syria to Turkey in an effort to supply Europe and seriously hamper Russia's export revenue made Assad vulnerable as declared enemy #1 in the Middle East to both the West and Arab Gulf States. Further making himself an even higher profile target was choosing the proposed gas pipeline that would be the largest in the region shared with its strongest ally and neighbor Iran and Iraq. Loyalty to Iran long deemed an outcast by the US-Israeli-Saudi axis-of-evil sealed Assad's fate for renewed Western targeted regime change skullduggery. The so called internal protests against the Assad government were quickly escalated into civil war in 2011 by US imperialistic interests further aggravated by US deploying an influx of foreign mercenary proxy terrorists.

The host of RT's InTheNow show asked the Russian Foreign Ministry's spokeswoman some tough questions during a 26-minute interview.

Anissa Naouai wanted to know if Russian media are following a narrative from the Kremlin to counter BBC and CNN propaganda, and what is the difference between Russia supporting the Syrian opposition to the US doing the same.

Can we please just dispense with the nonsense and talk about how things really are. The US-led NATO military alliance is at war with the world. And Russia is the main force holding this criminal organization at bay.

Listening to various Western political leaders at the recent Munich Security Conference is both laughable and cringe-making. We heard from the likes of US top diplomat John Kerry and British foreign secretary Philip Hammond holding forth on issues of international law and peace, while NATO's Jens Stoltenberg and General Philip Breedlove assured that there was no Cold War.

The EU's foreign affairs chief Federica Morgherini also made the stupendous denial that the world was not witnessing a new Cold War towards Russia, as did German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

Who do these people think we are? If they are stupid enough to live in denial that's up to them. But surely the rest of the thinking human race can see the world for what it is: a place where the United States and its various allies are running amok, making a mockery of international law, waging wars, covertly and overtly, against anyone who stands in their way.

This is exactly the sordid scenario that Russian president Vladimir Putin warned about back in 2007 when he addressed the Munich conference. Putin said it would end in tears, from lawlessness and state-sponsored terrorism, instigated and justified by Western leaders who hypocritically speak as if they are paragons of virtue.

(Speech given in Rome at the Italian Parliament on January 29, 2016)

Friends and Comrades, it is a great honor to be standing here - at the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian Parliament.

One year ago I was driving through the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, monitoring the situation in the refugee camps there. Winter was approaching and the mountains on the Lebanese - Syrian border were covered by snow. It was cold, very cold.

Some 20 minutes, after leaving Baalbek, I spotted an extremely humble makeshift refugee camp, growing literally from the road, in the middle of nowhere.

I stopped. Together with my interpreter, I walked inside and engaged several people in conversation.

The situation was desperate. Children were hungry and could not register for schools through the UNHCR or through the Lebanese government, which, by that time, had almost collapsed. Many electronic food cards that were issued to the migrants did not function. Work permits were not offered, and without proper paperwork, local social services could not be used. In brief: a total disaster.

According to Soros, Russia's strategy is to "avoid collapse by making the EU implode first - by exacerbating the migration crisis and stoking Islamophobia".

On February 11, the Guardian ran an article by George Soros which had run a day earlier here entitled "Putin is a bigger threat to Europe's existence than Isis."

After a quick check of my vital signs, I confirmed that I was indeed awake and the article was real and in the Guardian not The Onion. Before I look at the tissue of untruths which make up the substance of Soros' article, a few general words about psychopaths are in order.

I have met a few psychopaths in my life - a pernicious but small-time example is a real-estate "salesman" in Spain who cost my family a great deal of time and money. The real problem with psychopaths - big-time and small-time - is not primarily that they do bad things, but that we - non-psychopaths - are ill-prepared to deal with the fundamental difference between us and them.

We - people with operational consciences - think (wrongly) that everyone is like us. We are shackled to the assumption that just because we would not do unspeakably evil things - or would be unable to live with ourselves if we did - all other people work the same way.

They do not.

There could hardly have been a more appropriate start for the Chinese Year of the Monkey, geopolitically, than the prime monkey business enacted in Munich between US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

The Syrian charade now proceeds under a vague "cessation of hostilities" - which is not a ceasefire - to be implemented within a week. Further on down the road, as this is the real world, "hostilities" will inevitably resume.

As Lavrov stressed multiple times, "we made proposals on implementing a ceasefire, quite specific ones." And yet Washington and the Saudi-Turkish combo relented. A frightened, cornered House of Saud - with its remote-controlled "moderate rebel" gaggle being routed on the ground - even started spinning the ludicrous notion of sending ground troops, a.k.a. a bunch of mercenaries, to "help the US effort" against Daesh (ISIS/ISIL/IS).

The monkey business reached such a level of un-sustainability that Russian premier Dmitry Medvedev felt compelled to tell an interviewer from Germany's Handelsblatt, "The Americans and our [Arab] partners must think hard about this: Do they want a permanent war?"

Former Greek finance minister says Europe is disintegrating, run by a cartel and in dire need of reform.

Europe is sliding into "a modern 1930s" and authorities are "making it up as they go along", Yanis Varoufakis has warned as he launches a new movement which he says will "democratise" the continent.

Speaking to The Independent as he outlined his vision of the DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement 2025) project, the self-described "erratic Marxist" says he wants to remove power from an unaccountable, authoritarian elite and distribute it fairly to the continent's citizens.

Seven months after resigning as Greek finance minister, Mr Varoufakis outlined the "terrible" similarities between Europe now and the continent 80 years ago as it hurtled towards war.

"We don't have Nazis doing Kristallnacht in Berlin. [But] We have Nazis in Greece doing something similar in a suburb of Greece, where they are attacking in the middle of the night the shops and houses of migrants."

"There are big differences, but from the perspective of an economist we have terrible similarities."

I am consecutively stuffing my ears with various airline earplugs, in order not to hear the news blasted on the radio.

I am closing my eyes when the topic appears on TV, even on RT or Press TV.

I skip newspaper headlines.

I beg my friends, comrades and relatives not to bring up the subject in front of me.

I don't want to know anything about the US Presidential elections!

It is not some sort of pose or "rebellion"; it is just an honest, powerful fear of having my brain damaged, my thoughts derailed from searching for alternative humanistic and political concepts.

I see no need to know who, from all those already pre-approved by the Regime and therefore allowed to "compete", is going to get nominated by his or her political gang, and who will be finally mounting the saddle of that static wooden horse which is as a rule galloping nowhere, inspires no one and only jumps around crushing with its heavy murderous horseshoes everything and everyone who dares to demand true freedom.