Obama, who has visited Saudi Arabia more times than any US president before him, was not greeted by the Saudi king at the airport. Saudi state television broadcast no live pictures of the US president's arrival. It was the US ambassador to Saudi Arabia and a local governor who met the American leader off the plane.

President Obama came to Saudi Arabia to take part in a summit of Persian Gulf leaders and discuss Islamic State, Al Qaeda and Yemen with King Salman. This comes in stark contrast to the reception of other high-profile guests, whom the 80-year-old King Salman greeted personally on the airfield.

Obama did have a two-and-a-half hour conversation with King Salman later, a talk that reportedly "really cleared the air," the US administration officials assured the American media. Barack Obama's visit has been downplayed by the Middle Eastern newspapers, too, generally saying that as a "lame duck" Obama hardly has time to mend strained relations, the BBC reports.

The usually extremely close relations between Washington and Riyadh have been fraying recently over a number of issues Saudi Arabia regards as matters of life and death.

Turkey has met less than half of the conditions required for its citizens to be granted visa-free travel to the European Union, according to an EU official. The country has until the end of the month to reach the benchmarks laid out by Brussels. The chance at visa-free entry into Europe for Turkish citizens is being offered in return for Ankara's vow to take back all illegal immigrants who cross into Greece from Turkey. Marta Cygan, a director in the European Commission's Migration and Home Affairs unit, told the European Parliament on Thursday that Turkey has now satisfied 35 of the 72 conditions entirely or almost entirely.

"The Turkish authorities have definitely been accelerating the implementation of administrative and legal reforms allowing them to fulfill the requirements," she told lawmakers, as quoted by Reuters.

The country has until April 30 to meet the necessary requirements, which include sharing more information on fraudulent documents used to travel to the EU, issuing biometric passports, and granting access to its labor market and other services to non-Syrian refugees seeking shelter in the country.

The country's backlog of around 140,000 asylum applications must also be reduced, and Ankara must establish an independent body to monitor rights abuses by law enforcement and government authorities.

Syria and Russia are considering the possibility of setting up joint banks to carry out transactions between the two countries, Syrian Prime Minister Wael Nader Halqi told Sputnik.

"The Russian-Syrian business council has expressed a wish to open a joint Russian-Syrian bank with an equity participation of 50 percent by each side. The Syrian participation will be provided by Syrian businessmen with sufficient banking experience. This bank would be controlled by the countries' central banks," Halqi said.

"At the moment, there is a discussion at the Central Bank of Syria on the most appropriate form for the creation of a Russian bank in Syria, in order to ease the financing of banking transactions between the two countries, which serves mutual interests and will simplify trade," he added.

Syria and Russia are holding consultations on the possibility of transactions in their national currencies Wael Nader Halqi said.

"Back in 2013, the Central Bank of Syria prepared a detailed bank mechanism on the exchange [of goods] in national currencies and presented it to the Russian side to a representative of the Russian Central Bank's head. Several rounds of negotiations were held on this mechanism. We were told that consultations with Russian banks were ongoing. Work on examining this issue, as well as the issue of cooperation with Syrian banks in this is still ongoing. Soon we will be told the names of these banks," Halqi said in an interview.

"You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."—George Orwell, 1984

In past ages, those who dared to speak out against tyranny—viewed as an act of treason—were blinded, castrated, disfigured, mutilated, rendered mute by having their tongues cut out of their heads, and ultimately crucified.

In the American police state, the price to be paid for speaking truth to power (also increasingly viewed as an act of treason) is surveillance, censorship, jail and ultimately death.

It's a diabolically ingenious tactic for muzzling, disarming and ultimately eliminating one's critics or potential adversaries.

However, where many Americans go wrong is in assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or challenging the government's authority in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal.

In fact, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, all you really need to do is use certain trigger words, surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, drive a car, stay at a hotel, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, question government authority, or generally live in the United States.

With the help of automated eyes and ears, a growing arsenal of high-tech software, hardware and techniques, government propaganda urging Americans to turn into spies and snitches, as well as social media and behavior sensing software, government agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged "words," and "suspicious" activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state.

It's the American police state's take on the dystopian terrors foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick all rolled up into one oppressive pre-crimeand pre-thought crime package.

What's more, the technocrats who run the surveillance state don't even have to break a sweat while monitoring what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, how much you spend, whom you support, and with whom you communicate. Computers now do the tedious work of trolling social media, the internet, text messages and phone calls for potentially anti-government remarks—all of which is carefully recorded, documented, and stored to be used against you someday at a time and place of the government's choosing.

While this may sound like a riff on a bad joke, it's a bad joke with "we the people" as the punchline. Yet it is no laughing matter that Americans are being jailed for growing orchids, feeding whales, collecting rainwater, and praying in their backyards. There is nothing humorous about Americans having their families terrorized by SWAT teams, their pets killed, their children shot, their homes trashed and their privacy shredded. And there's really not much comic relief to be found when the citizenry is forced to pay their own government to jail, spy on, censor, terrorize and kill them.

The following activities are guaranteed to get you censored, surveilled, eventually placed on a government watch list, possibly detained and potentially killed.

Laugh at your own peril.

Sections of the American establishment believe the Kremlin supports Donald Trump. It doesn't. However, many Russians are concerned a future President Hillary will further worsen, already appalling, relations between Moscow and Washington.

Bachman Turner Overdrive was a bunch of Canadian rockers who hit it big in the mid 1970's. The band's success was curious. In an era of glam rock and punk, their brand of three-chord guitar was a few years out of date. Nevertheless, despite their old-fashioned sound, they sold millions of records.

Hillary Clinton is the Bachman Turner Overdrive of US politics. Today, American youth, in common with their global counterparts, are searching for new ideas. Witness the appeal of anti-establishment figures like Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and Beppe Grillo among young voters. Even Donald Trump has galvanized the disaffected American working class behind his campaign.

Hillary offers a position from the 90's and 00's when her husband, Bill, and his successor, George W. Bush, ran the Washington show. In fact, she's something of an amalgam of both. Liberal, at least in public, on social matters and slightly-left leaning on economics like Bill, but a Bush-like hardcore neocon on matters of national security and foreign affairs. Because of this, she's attracted support across the establishment, even if she remains unloved by the general public. Alarmingly, her popularity ratings are stuck in the mid 30's.

In the town of Zaitsevo with a pre-war population of almost 4000 inhabitants, about 1 600 civilians cower under Ukaine's almost daily bombardments. Among them are about 500 children and nine veterans of the Second World War, very old with lots of elderly. Recently, a couple that we had visited in February got hurt, a grandmother of 80 years and her husband were hit in the arm and head.

Last week, the Ukrainian army used white phosphorus projectiles precisely in this area, yet these weapons are prohibited by Protocol III of the Geneva Convention in the war zones where civilians are concentrated, which certainly is the case of Zaïtsevo.

We rendezvoused with a company of Italian and Russian journalists to observe the situation of the large village of Zaïtsevo. Surrounded by the Ukrainian lines overlooking the town, its situation has been bad for many weeks, especially since the arrival of Nazi fanatics of Pravy Sektor who have at heart to terrorize the population.

These criminal weapons were invented by the Anglo-Saxons, Britons and Americans during World War II and were used at several levels, in so-called strategic bombing but in reality, terror on German cities, then in Korea, Vietnam and recently in Iraq and the Israelis in Gaza.

Since the beginning of the war, the Ukrainians, who are supported by the US and many European countries, have not hesitated to use these terror weapons.Injuries caused by such weapons are horrific and the damage extensive, calling to mind the survivors of the great bombing of Dresden in February 1945 and other Japanese cities.

Turkey's embassy in Stockholm asked Sweden's TV4 television network to pull a documentary on the mass killings of Assyrians by the Ottoman Empire because the film "will fail to serve the principle of objectivity."

Ahead of Sunday evening's scheduled broadcast of a documentary titled Seyfo 1915 - The Assyrian Genocide, TV4 said it received an email from Turkish embassy press officer Arif Gulen, in which he opposes the film's use of the term "genocide," which is often used to describe the tragic death of as many as 275,000 Assyrians at the hands of Ottoman Turks during WWI.

The letter, which was subsequently published on TV4's official website, asks the station to "reconsider your decision on broadcasting of the... documentary film with a balanced and sensible attitude," while cautioning that "only a competent international tribunal can determine whether a particular event is genocide."

His statement provoked a sharp reaction from the broadcaster, which denounced Gulen's attempt to pressure the channel to cancel its broadcast, and aired the documentary.

"We can never accept this. We will protest against any attempt to exert pressure that threatens freedom of expression," said TV4's program director, Viveka Hansson, in a statement on the company's website.

Speaking to Expressen, Gulen said that he had "full respect for freedom of expression and for the channel," but refused to retract his plea to TV4 to withdraw the documentary piece.

According to the Russian Foreign Minister, the statements of the Turkish leadership on Nagorno-Karabakh crisis are absolutely unacceptable.

Statements by Turkey on the crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh are not helping the situation and sound like calls to war, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Friday:

"I believe that the statements that were voiced from the mouths of the Turkish leadership are absolutely unacceptable for one simple reason: these were calls not for peace, but for war. These were calls to solving the conflict using military force. This contradicts the positions of the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk group's position at the roots and at the roots of the global community."

Violence in Azerbaijan's breakaway region escalated early this month. Baku and Yerevan have accused each other of provoking hostilities. A ceasefire was achieved on April 5, following days of clashes that led to numerous casualties on both sides.

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict began in 1988, when the autonomous region with a predominantly Armenian population sought to secede from the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. The region proclaimed independence when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, triggering a war that lasted until a Russia-brokered ceasefire in 1994.

The resolution adopted by 33 countries condemns the Israeli government's stewardship of Jerusalem.

The Israeli government and Jewish groups have expressed outrage at a resolution adopted by the U.N. cultural agency that put the Western Wall Plaza in quotation marks, described Jewish sites as "so-called" and even claimed that some Jewish graves were bogus.

The resolution , sponsored by several Arab countries and adopted by UNESCO's 58-nation executive board last week, condemned the Israeli government's stewardship of east Jerusalem, home to the city's most sensitive holy sites.

The April 15 document also decried the renovation of "so-called Jewish ritual baths" and the alleged creation of "Jewish fake graves." Sites were either referred to by their Arabic or English names or, in the case of the Western Wall Plaza, the holiest site where Jews can pray, were put in quotes.

Riyadh has approved a long-term economic blueprint to transform the kingdom's economy aimed at minimizing the country's reliance on oil. Titled 'Saudi Vision 2030', the plan reveals budget, policy and regulatory changes which are to be realized over the next 15 years to help the country's economy to survive beyond crude.

Over seventy percent of the country's income comes from energy exports. With the plunge in crude prices Saudi Arabia ran a record deficit of over $90 billion in 2015. Riyadh intends to raise its share of non-oil exports in non-oil GDP from 16 percent to 50 percent. It aims to build a "prosperous and sustainable economic future" for the kingdom, according to the news release. It also gave details on privatization and the creation of what it called the "largest sovereign wealth fund in the world."

"We will smooth the process of listing private Saudi companies and state-owned enterprises, including Aramco. This will require deepening liquidity in our capital markets, fortifying the role of the debt market and paving the way for the derivatives market," the announcement said.