Billionaire investor George Soros says the Trump administration is "a danger to the world," and the opposition the president has garnered will make him a "temporary phenomenon" which "will disappear in 2020 or even sooner."


During a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Thursday, Soros, 87, who heads the Soros Fund Management and Open Society Foundations, slammed President Donald Trump and his leadership, CNBC reports.

While laying into Trump, who is also in Davos for the forum, Soros mentioned the current drama unfolding between North Korea and the US.

The billionaire said Trump's handling of the situation with North Korea is moving the US towards nuclear war, because it is unwilling to accept North Korea as a new nuclear power.

Soros added that US actions against the small Far East country "creates a strong incentive for North Korea to develop its nuclear capacity with all possible speed." Such a rapid development could "induce the United States to use its nuclear superiority preemptively, in effect to start a nuclear war to prevent a nuclear war."

Soros called this possible move by the US "a self-contradictory strategy," CNBC reports. However, Soros didn't stop there on the dangers of Trump's presidency.

The war for dominance in the Middle East, following the crushing of ISIS, appears about to commence in Syria - with NATO allies America and Turkey on opposing sides.

Turkey is moving armor and troops south to Syria's border enclave of Afrin, occupied by Kurds, to drive them out, and then drive the Syrian Kurds out of Manbij further south as well. Says President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, "We will destroy all terror nests, one by one, in Syria, starting from Afrin and Manbij."

For Erdogan, the Kurdish YPG, the major U.S. ally in Syria, is an arm of the Kurdish PKK in Turkey, which we and the Turks have designated as a terrorist organization. While the Kurds were our most effective allies against ISIS in Syria, Turkey views them as a mortal peril and intends to deal with that threat.

If Erdogan is serious, a clash with the U.S. is coming, as our Kurdish allies occupy most of Syria's border with Turkey.

Moreover, the U.S. has announced plans to create a 30,000-man Border Security Force of Kurds and Arabs to keep ISIS out of Syria. Erdogan has branded this BSF a "terror army," and President Bashar Assad of Syria has called BSF members "traitors."

This U.S. plan to create a BSF inside Syria, Damascus declared, "represents a blatant attack on the sovereignty and territorial integrity and unity of Syria, and a flagrant violation of international law."

Does not the Syrian government have a point?

President Trump on Wednesday said he is open to offering young immigrants a pathway to citizenship over 10-12 years, as long as he gets billions of dollars to pay for a border wall and other security measures.

Under his forthcoming immigration plan, which will be released Monday, Trump told reporters that protections for recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program would "morph into" citizenship over that period. "We're going to morph into it. It's going to happen, at some point in the future, over a period of 10 to 12 years," he said. A senior administration official later clarified that citizenship is a "discussion point" in the plan and that young immigrants would have to meet certain conditions in order to gain it.

The official added the offer only applies to the nearly 690,000 immigrants who benefit from the Obama-era DACA program that Trump cancelled last fall. Those people are allowed to live and work in the U.S. without fear of deportation.

Having accused Russia of interfering in the US 2016 election, Democrats are guilty of serious double standards, says political analyst John Griffing. They believe not in election integrity, but in winning and keeping power.

Senior US Democrats in Congress are claiming that Russia is behind an online campaign to release a classified Republican memo. At the same time, a number of US Republican congressmen are calling for the release of a top secret intelligence document, as it may expose political bias against Trump in the Russia probe.

Meanwhile, Americans launched a new hashtag "#NotARussianBot" on Twitter, affirming that they are real people and don't work for the Kremlin.

Though it is extremely difficult to get a clear sense of the state of the fighting between the Turkish military and the Kurds in northern Syria in the hotly contested district of Afrin, the growing impression is of a Turkish military offensive which has become bogged down.

This has been a constantly recurring feature of Turkish military operations in Syria over the last two years. Though they invariably begin with confident predictions of rapid victory, in practice they quickly run into the sand as the Turkish military and its Jihadi allies struggle to overcome the resistance of the seasoned fighters of ISIS and of the Kurdish militia the YPG.

The reason for these failures was discussed by me in an article published by The Duran on 19th February 2017 in which I discussed the succession of defeats inflicted on the Turkish military by ISIS over the course of the battle for the strategically important Syrian town of Al-Bab.

The Turkish force that is besieging Al-Bab is comparatively small. It is also unbalanced, with barely any Turkish infantry to support the tanks, and with such Turkish infantry as is there consisting mainly of Special Forces, who are few in number and who are not generally used to support tanks.

The reason for this is that for domestic political reasons President Erdogan's government is unwilling to send Turkish infantry into Syria. Turkish infantry units are generally manned by conscripts, and President Erdogan does not want to face the public opposition he might provoke if he sent young Turkish conscripts to Syria to fight the hardened veterans of ISIS and the Kurdish YPG.

The result however is that the Turkish military besieging Al-Bab has to rely for infantry support on the Jihadi fighters of the so-called 'Free Syrian Army', who have proved consistently unable to stand up in a fight against any one of their enemies, be they the Syrian army, ISIS or the YPG.

Pictures which have appeared of the Turkish forces which have been sent to Afrin suggest that the same pattern is repeating itself, with the forces looking excessively tank heavy and over reliant for infantry support on Turkey's local Jihadi allies who have repeatedly shown themselves incapable of standing up in actual fighting against either ISIS or the YPG.

Former FBI Director James Comey, bureau Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein are officially named in the "shocking" FISA abuse memo, reports the Daily Beast.

The Daily Beast reports:

A controversial Republican memo alleging surveillance abuse specifically names FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein along with former FBI Director James Comey.

Capitol Hill sources on both sides of the aisle say the memo's release is only a matter of time. And when it comes out, these current and former officials - all GOP bêtes noires - are likely to face even more criticism from the right over their involvement in FBI counterintelligence work.

Republicans, including Trump himself, have spent months attacking McCabe and Comey while special counsel Robert Mueller has been investigating Team Trump's connections to the Kremlin. Rosenstein put that probe in place-a move Trump has derided as a witch hunt. [...]

Rep. Chris Collins, a New York Republican, told The Daily Beast that Nunes has told Republicans his staff spent months putting the memo together.

Residents of the Kurdish-majority city of Kobane in Syria's north took to the streets on Wednesday to protest against the ongoing Turkish operation dubbed as "Olive Branch" in the northwest canton of Afrin. "The US is using the Kurds to combat IS [ISIS]. We fought IS in Syrian and Iraqi Kurdistan, it was the largest terrorist organization in the world, and we did that to the World, Adnan Buzan, a protestor said.

"When we got rid of IS, the US started supporting our adversary to the Kurdish people under weak pretexts, so it is a shameful stance by the Americans," he continued.

The Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) has been indirectly supported by the United States, despite the YPG being the Syrian branch of the Turkey-based Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) that Washington recognizes as a terrorist organization.

The YPG, and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) umbrella organization it leads, has been extremely resistant to diplomatically resolve its differences with Damascus so that it can pursue partition from the Syrian state, thinking it had the full-backing of the United States to do so.

The American President's straight talk charms many at Davos and creates an air of optimism amidst the storm of negative rhetoric

President Donald Trump flew to Davos for the World Economic Forum, and completely electrified it, according to reports.

Although the "America First" slogan had raised concern in the global economic community that this meant the United States would disregard the needs and concerns of other world economic powers, the President dispelled this worry handily. Members of his cabinet had been in Davos a bit before his arrival, and were involved in interview and panels already, and when he arrived, he and his assistants were able to explain more what this philosophy actually means.

"America first is not America alone", said Gary Cohn, the president's economic adviser. The point of this idea is not for the United States to dominate and control the world, but in Trump's view, to make better deals and better trade agreements around the world, and to also cement and strengthen the diplomatic relations between the USA and her allies, most notably England and Israel.

Two off-road vehicles carrying European-made electronic weaponry were destroyed by Syrian forces near the US base at Al-Tanf, the Russian MoD said. Five militants died and IS propaganda material was found at the scene.

Three off-road vehicles with heavy weaponry mounted on them were spotted by a Syrian militia unit patrolling the boundary of the US-controlled area in Al-Tanf, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Friday in a press release.

The Syrians opened fire, destroying two vehicles and killing five militants. The third vehicle managed to return to Al-Tanf, the ministry said. While checking the skirmish site, militia forces found Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) propaganda materials, European-made electronic warfare equipment as well as large amounts of small arms ammunition.

The slain militants could belong to a US-trained armed opposition group, according to the ministry. "Flags bearing insignia of the 'Forces of Martyr Ahmad al-Abdo' were found inside the vehicles,"the statement said, referring to a name of a militant group trained by American Special Forces in Al-Tanf.

The Russian military believes US forces have effectively turned their military base near the town of Al-Tanf in south-eastern Syria into a terrorist training camp.

A US counter-terrorism expert has accused Lebanese group Hezbollah for "engaging in criminal conduct" in the UK. Dr Matthew Levitt has said that London "has a Hezbollah problem" and the group's partial ban was not working.

Former FBI agent, Levitt believes that the partial ban, which prohibits the military wing of the group while allowing the political entity, is failing. He calls for the UK and EU to adopt the US' prohibition of the group in its entirety, labelling it an organisation with ties to terrorism.

In his in article for the Study of Radicalisation at King's College London, Levitt stated that the situation has led to Hezbollah carrying out illegal activities including fundraising for military campaigns, money laundering and drug trafficking in the UK as well as other European countries. While the group's presence in the UK, according to Levitt, is undermining British interests abroad.