In 2009, Hillary Clinton, then U.S. Secretary of State, presented her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, with a "reset" button she thought symbolized a new era for Russian and American diplomacy.

Lavrov pointed out the word the Americans had chosen, "peregruzka," meant "overcharged," not "reset." Though the two leaders laughed off the mistake, the mistranslated button was a symbol of persistent misunderstanding between the two nations.

Russia has long been characterized by many in the West as enigmatic; indeed, almost beyond understanding. It was Winston Churchill who in October of 1939, mere weeks after the invasion of Poland by Nazi armed forces, speculated on the role of Russia in the war, famously depicting Russia as "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."

He added: "...but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest. It cannot be in accordance with the interest of the safety of Russia that Germany should plant itself upon the shores of the Black Sea, or that it should overrun the Balkan States and subjugate the Slavonic peoples of south eastern Europe. That would be contrary to the historic life-interests of Russia."

As we noted today, the rumors of an Italian bank bailout, which started on Monday morning, and were promptly shot down by Merkel the next day, got louder after a Reuters report that the Italian government is considering more creative ways to inject liquidity into Italy's banks. However that was just an appetizer to a main course, which came later today when as the WSJ reported citing a spokeswoman for the European Union's executive arm that the "European Commission has authorized Italy to use government guarantees to create a precautionary liquidity support program for their banks."

How did this happen so quietly under the table and without Merkel's blessing? WSJ says that the program was approved under the bloc's "extraordinary crisis rules for state aid."

And here we thought that Italy's banks are actually doing so very well. Oh wait, no we didn't.

As the WSJ notes, the proposed "crisis" plan is the "other leg of an intervention plan considered by the government" namely, the direct capital injection into Italian banks that would add up to €40 billion in capital to the banking sector", the one we profiled previously. It is also the plan that Merkel supposedly shut down before it got off the ground. However, Europe had a Plan B up its sleeve.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has been interviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation over her use of a private email server to store classified information, her campaign spokesman has said.

"Secretary Clinton gave a voluntary interview this morning about her email arrangement while she was Secretary. She is pleased to have had the opportunity to assist the Department of Justice in bringing this review to a conclusion," Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill said after a three and a half hour interview.

"Out of respect for the investigative process, [Clinton] will not comment further on her interview," Merrill added.
Clinton was interviewed at FBI Headquarters in Washington DC.

At the end of the battle for Fallujah, a convoy of around 500 vehicles allowed Isis fighters to flee the city to Syria.

The Pentagon refused to bomb the convoy because the vehicles belonged to civilians and they were probably transporting the wives and children of some jihadists.


However, the Iraqi army decided to bomb it, destroying more than 200 vehicles and killing their occupants.

Iraqi soldiers are convinced that the Pentagon had received instruction to let the CIA advisers, that were training the jihadists, escape.

Guys, this is not a joke. Those who understand French can listen and hear for themselves:

Here is what he actually said:

"You need to know that those who observe us from afar are worried. I have have seen, listened and heard many leaders of other planets and they are very worried because they wonder about the course the EU will follow. So we have to reassure both the Europeans and those who observe us from afar" (by the way - this section was removed from the official transcript of his speech)

Sure, the senile (drunk?) man meant to say "plusieurs des dirigeants de notre planète" (many leaders of our planet) and it came out "plusieurs des dirigeants d'autres planètes" (many leaders from other planets), but this is still telling. To think that this is the kind of person who "heads" (at least formally) the EU is both hilarious and depressing.

Good thing that the EU is totally irrelevant.

Russia and Turkey have begun discussions to restore ties following more than six months of political discord, with the foreign ministers of the two countries meeting in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi.

Normalizing relations between Russia and Turkey will start through establishing closer diplomatic contact, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Friday following talks with his Turkish counterpart, Mevlut Cavusoglu.

"We agreed today with Minister Cavusoglu that such contact would be established in the nearest future," Sputnik quoted the Russian FM as saying.

Lavrov's Turkish counterpart agreed that the meeting in Sochi had been a constructive one, combining discussions of both bilateral and regional issues.

"We discussed bilateral relations and measures on how to return to the level we had before," Cavusoglu said, mentioning top-level contact between the two countries' presidents, prime ministers and foreign ministers. "This was a constructive meeting," the Turkish minister added.

Putting an end to the Syrian conflict topped the list of the regional issues discussed at the session, which took place on the sidelines of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation Organization (BSEC) Council of Ministers of Foreign Affairs in the Russian resort city of Sochi.

"We can discuss everything in the framework of our bilateral dialogue, even the most difficult issues, including the task of preventing the terrorist infiltration into Syria from abroad, the task of preventing the use of Turkish territory in support of terrorist organizations in Syria," Lavrov said.

Western politicians have been forced into the awkward position of being obliged to negotiate with Damascus over security under the table in fear of raising Washington's ire, Syria's president told Australia's SBS News in an exclusive interview.

"They attack us politically and then they send officials to deal with us under the table, especially the security, including your [the Australian] government," Bashar Assad told SBS News reporter Luke Waters.

"They don't want to upset the United States," the Syrian leader said. "Actually most of the Western officials only repeat what the United States want them to say. This is the reality," Assad said in an interview filmed in Damascus that took two years of negotiations to arrange.

Denying the Armenian genocide will soon be a crime in France, as the French parliament has passed an amendment criminalizing the denial of all crimes against humanity. Those flouting the law could face a $50,000 fine and up to a year in prison.

The new legislation, which was passed on the first reading in the French Parliament, is expected to come into force by the end of the year. It will now pass to the Senate, the upper house, for approval. Previously, only denial of the Holocaust had been a criminal offense in France.

"This text will punish the challenge or the trivialization of all crimes against humanity and war crimes," Ericka Bereigts, a junior minister in charge of equality, told AFP.

Armenia's foreign minister, Eduard Nalbandyan, has welcomed the decision of the French parliament's lower house.

"We welcome the bill initiated by the French government and unanimously passed by the lower house of the French parliament. We express hope that the French Senate will pass the bill as well and it will be signed into law. Thus France makes another very important step towards preventing genocides and crimes against humanity," Nalbandyan said in a statement.

The bitter irony continues. While the latest over-the-top ploy to confiscate our guns domestically has the feds sloppily staging yet another mass shooting with in Orlando - the biggest in US history at that, overseas they can't seem to give away US guns and arms fast enough to America's so called enemies. What's up with that?

In the latest "we can't find our weapons" saga, this time it's the CIA's turn to embarrassingly admit that a 2013 secret arms deal with our Middle East buddy Saudi Arabia that goes by the code name Timber Sycamore has gone awry the last three years. It seems that millions of dollars' worth of lethal weapons that were supposed to end up in possession of those "moderate Syrian rebels," you know the "good guy" terrorists fighting ISIS [and Assad] in Syria, were "misplaced" onto the black market by way of Jordanian intelligence officers in charge of delivering the goods who covertly support the Sunni Islamic State terrorists. In another episode of Fast and Furious Part Two, US supplied guns were once again used to kill Americans. Government officials this week admitted that those same missing weapons are believed to have been used last November to kill two Americans and three others at a police training facility in Amman, Jordan. It's déjà vu all over again for the sandal-ridden Obama administration, reminiscent of ATF's clandestine Fast and Furious operation's infamously trafficking 2,000 guns to the Mexican drug cartel that later murdered an American Border Patrol agent and scores of innocent Mexican civilians.

The US government seems cluelessly inept at being able to either convincingly pull off a false flag or keep track of its vast amount of lethal weapons going abroad only to wind up in the wrong hands murdering Americans. This article will include a capsulized nutshell presenting Washington's rather long and dubious history of such disastrous folly. It will illuminate the catastrophic consequences caused by either US gross incompetence or by maleficent grand design that either way in large part has led to the latest arms race currently responsible for making our planet more armed and dangerous than any previous time in human history.

This latest scam is alleged to involve a Jordanian lieutenant colonel as the gun smuggling kingpin regularly siphoning off guns from US shipments as they arrived in Jordan since 2013, delivering only a portion to designated drop off points to US backed "moderate" rebels fighting in Syria, while secretly selling off the rest to a thriving black market that in turn sold to ISIS and other so called "bad" terrorists. His cadre of corrupt Jordanian officers were getting rich off their gun smuggling operation buying expensive items like SUV's, iPhones and all the latest hi-tech toys, while unloading thousands of US made rocket grenade launchers, mortars, Kalashnikov automatic weapons and small arms for the right price to various terrorists and militants at the local arms bizarre.

Hacked private emails of the US general formerly in charge of NATO reveal a campaign to pressure the White House into escalating the conflict with Russia over Ukraine, involving several influential players in Washington. The emails, posted by the site DCLeaks, show correspondence between General Philip M. Breedlove, former head of the US European Command and supreme commander of NATO forces, with several establishment insiders concerning the situation in Ukraine following the February 2014 coup that ousted the elected government in favor of a US-backed regime.

Breedlove served as the NATO Supreme Commander between May 2013 and March 2016. His personal email incorporated his Air Force call sign "Bwana" - a Swahili word for "boss." The hacked emails reveal his frequent and intense communications with retired General Wesley Clark, as well as former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and involving a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, State Department official Victoria Nuland, and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt.


Clark, who commanded NATO during the 1999 war in Yugoslavia, reached out to Breedlove in April 2014. On April 8, he forwarded "intelligence" obtained by Anatoly Pinchuk and Dmitry Tymchuk, activists close to the new regime, claiming a Russian invasion was in the works.