Afghanistan's election authorities say they have decided to delay a presidential election by three months to July 20 due to delays in registration and ongoing technical issues.

IEC chief Abdul Badi Sayyad added in an announcement on December 30 that provincial and district council elections, as well as a previously postponed parliamentary vote in Ghazni Province, will be held on the same day, according to AFP.

IEC officials have recently admitted that they were considering pushing back the vote, which was expected in April.

"April will be very difficult because of the harsh winter and transporting election materials, security, and the budget issues," Sayyad told a news conference in Kabul. "To better prepare for the vote, we have decided to hold the election in July next year."

Russia's successful test of its Avangard hypersonic glide missile will almost certainly ignite a full-on arms race panic in the US, according to German newspaper Die Welt. As we noted earlier this week, the missile was launched from a base in the southern Ural Mountains on Wednesday and successfully hit a practice target on Kamchatka 3,700 miles away.

The test launch will likely alarm US intelligence analysts and "provoke a panic" among Pentagon officials because the US has nothing to defend against the missile, the newspaper said, despite the fact that Russia has been working on the weapon since 2002 when the US withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and began developing anti-ballistic defenses. Earlier this year, Russian President Vladimir Putin teased that the weapon would be ready to deploy within "months".

The test, according to the paper, is proof of "saber rattling" between the US and Russia as tensions between the two super powers climb to their most intense level since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Today's election in the Democratic Republic of Congo is already collapsing under the weight of massive fraud. Reporters who visited Limete, an opposition stronghold in the capital, Kinshasa, reported that no voting materials had been delivered all morning, while long lines waited patiently. Even before the vote, the Joseph Kabila regime had banned voting outright in three other opposition areas, falsely claiming that an outbreak of ebola in one of them made voting unsafe. A Washington Post editorial two days ago had already accurately called the election "a travesty," citing Kabila's "chicanery," "repression," "subterfuge," and "electoral flimflam."

But if the mainstream news coverage is typical, the reports will be centered on Africans, with the implication that once again they have failed the test of democracy.

This year is ending on a note of triumph for the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Donald Trump has announced a rapid troop withdrawal from Syria, shocking everyone including his own generals and diplomats. Last week, the United Arab Emirates reopened its embassy in Damascus, which it had closed as part of a campaign of multinational pressure against the regime in 2011. Bahrain followed suit and other countries, including Kuwait, are expected to re-establish ties in the coming year. The Arab League is reportedly poised to re-admit Syria, seven years after expelling it.

These developments come five months after the regime made arguably its most consequential gain against the opposition since Syria's insurgency erupted, when it took control of Deraa in the south-west. Deraa, the cradle of the rebellion against Assad, had been the last stronghold of non-jihadist opposition; its surrender removed any viable threat against the regime, either politically or militarily, near the capital.


Taken together, the military and diplomatic developments over the past six months leave no room for doubt: Assad has decisively won the conflict. The rebels' former backers have not only given up on challenging his regime, they now actively want to embrace it - whether in public or in private. Internally, the regime has crushed any potent or legitimate opposition. Jihadists operating in north-western pockets of land under Turkish influence will be unlikely to find a foreign backer. Unlike the geopolitical winds that buffeted Saddam Hussein in the 1990s after the first Gulf war, everything is blowing strongly in Assad's favour.

The US troop withdrawal from Syria needs a "pause" in order to protect the Kurds, the potential interests of Israel, and to prevent Iran from scoring a big win in Syria, a top GOP senator has said.

The withdrawal of the US military from the country is currently in a "pause situation," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R- SC) told reporters on Monday after having lunch with President Trump at the White House.

"We talked about Syria. He told me some things I didn't know that made me feel a lot better about where we're headed in Syria," said Graham, who is an outspoken critic of Trump's decision to pull troops out of Syria.

"I think we're slowing things down in a smart way."

The Washington Post reminds us how the Saudi coalition war on Yemen helps Al Qaeda:

Last year, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on a powerful Yemeni Islamist warlord, accusing him of being a "prominent military instructor" and fundraiser for al-Qaeda who had also at one point "served with" the Islamic State and financed its forces.

But Abu al-Abbas is not on the run. He is not even in hiding.

By his own admission, Abbas continues to receive millions of dollars in weapons and financial support for his fighters from one of Washington's closest Middle East allies, the United Arab Emirates, undermining U.S. counterterrorism goals in Yemen.

The Saudi coalition's cooperation with and support for members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has been an open secret for many years. Back in August, the Associated Press published one of the most detailed reports on the coalition's practice of buying off and recruiting AQAP members as part of their war against the Houthis. Members of the coalition have been working with and supporting known terrorists for years, and they continue to do so even now. Meanwhile, U.S. officials keep justifying U.S. support for the coalition's war on Yemen by claiming that Saudi and Emirati cooperation on counterterrorism is so very important. The war on Yemen has strengthened jihadist groups both directly and indirectly, and this is just one more example of that. The U.S. continues to support a war that not only benefits jihadists by sowing chaos, but it also backs the governments that directly finance and arm those same terrorists.

The same neocons who gush about alliances today were telling anyone not on board with the Iraq invasion to 'go to hell.'

Is it blatant dishonesty or a convenient bout of amnesia? It's hard to tell. What I do know is this: the supposed American devotion to alliances, now being celebrated by those who deem the resignation of Defense Secretary James Mattis as heralding the end of Western civilization, is a load of malarkey.

The canonization of Mattis as a secular saint was underway in record time. In The New York Times, David Sanger describes Mattis as "the last senior official in the administration deeply invested in the world order that the United States has led for the 73 years since World War II, and the global footprint needed to keep that order together." Here the tradition of Marshall, Acheson, and Kennan ostensibly ends and the precipice beckons.

The Pentagon has acknowledged Iran's key role in restoring peace and stability to war-torn Afghanistan, backtracking on Washington's earlier claims that Tehran supports the local Taliban militant group.

"Iran seeks a stable Afghan government that is responsive to Iranian goals, the elimination of ISIS-K, the removal of the US/NATO presence, and the protection of Iranian concerns, such as water rights and border security," the US Department of Defense said in a report sent to Congress this week.

The Pentagon also admitted Iran's influence in Afghanistan, saying that Tehran pursues "a multitrack strategy" of engaging with the Afghan government and seeks to boost bilateral economic ties with Kabul.


"Iranian involvement is most prominent in western, central, and northern Afghanistan, where local Afghans share common history, culture, religion, and language with Iran," according to the report.

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed

¬ Leonard Cohen, 'Everybody Knows'

French media reported yesterday that a police officer has been held in custody since December 23rd after he was chased and arrested in a busy Paris train station in possession of 'military-grade explosives and weapons'. The 29-year-old gendarme, stationed locally in Paris, was 'off-duty' at the time, but despite interrogating him for four days, investigators won't or can't say what he was doing passing through Gare de Lyon train station in central Paris with a sack full of terrorist goodies at the height of Christmas rush-hour. What they do know however, is that this particular cop was formerly in the military and is an expert in handling explosives.

Three days ago, coincidentally, or not, Strasbourg train station was temporarily evacuated after someone called in a bomb threat. This confluence of 'terror by train' reminds me of the unusual derailing of a high-speed train on the Paris-Strasbourg line - France's first fatal crash in 30 years of TGV travel - the day after the multi-site terror attacks in Paris in mid-November 2015. Despite the protestations of the train driver in that 'accident', and eyewitness reports of an explosion before the train derailed, the authorities immediately discounted sabotage and blamed the driver for 'speeding' (which he denied). Joe Quinn wrote about it at the time:

One possible reason for this irrational approach to the disaster that killed 11 people and injured 42 is that any reference to a terrorist attack as the cause of the derailment would immediately recall the worst terrorist atrocity in France prior to the Paris attacks last weekend.

On June 18th, 1961, at 3.10pm, a French train on the Paris-Strasbourg line derailed, killing 28 people and injuring 170. Several days before, a stationmaster near the crash site received a letter threatening an attack on the line. The letter was apparently ignored by police and the truth about the attack - that it was caused by a bomb on the line - was kept secret for 20 years.

The reason for the cover-up appears to have centered on the fact that the perpetrators were members of a NATO covert paramilitary force tasked with carrying out terrorist attacks on French civilians and politicians in an effort to influence French public and political opinion on the question of Algerian independence, and ensure the continued allegiance of European countries to NATO's ideology of thwarting closer Soviet-European ties. At one point the group, known as the Organisation of the Secret Army (OSA), attempted a coup d'etat against the government of Charles de Gaulle.

It is possible, therefore, that the reason French authorities were so quick to discount terrorism as the cause of the TGV crash one day after the Paris terror attacks was to avoid establishing a link, if only circumstantial, between previous home-grown terrorism of the NATO variety, and the current Muslim terror threat. Two threats which, in the final analysis, may be revealed as having the same origin.

2018 was actually a remarkably quiet year for mass casualty 'Islamist terror attacks' in Europe and the West as a whole, especially compared to the previous 3 years. Before the incident at the Christmas Market in Strasbourg, France, on December 11th, I can think of only two other mass casualty 'Islamist terror attacks' taking place anywhere in the West in 2018: one that took place in Carcassone and nearby Trebes, in southern France, in March this year, and which left 4 people dead (excluding the perpetrator). A second took place in Liege, eastern Belgium, in May this year, and left 3 people dead (also excluding the perpetrator).

Coincidentally, or not, French security services on December 11th arrested three more people in connection with that March attack.

The US Department of the Interior seeks to reserve the right to ignore any FOIA requests from the public that it deems too "burdensome" to fulfil. The move amounts to censorship and is a crackdown on transparency, critics argue.

Claiming that it is overwhelmed by the volume of requests from journalist and the general public, the Department of the Interior proposed revising the regulations on processing records under the Freedom of Information Act.

The bureau will not honor a request that requires an unreasonably burdensome search or requires the bureau to locate, review, redact, or arrange for inspection of a vast quantity of material.

The proposed new rule states that the modification is necessary to "best serve our customers."