The Air Force on Thursday grounded its fleet of B-1B Lancers to inspect the conventional bombers' ejection systems after discovering a parachute rigging problem during a routine inspection, the service announced in a statement.

Air Force technicians will inspect all 62 of the service's B-1B aircraft during the stand down, said Air Force Capt. Earon Brown, a spokesman for Air Force Global Strike Command. The jets will be returned to flying status on a rolling basis as they are inspected and any issues are resolved, he said.

The stand down marks the second such grounding of the Air Force B-1B fleet in about one year due to ejection system concerns. Last May, Lancers were grounded about three weeks after a B1-B from Dyess Air Force Base in Texas experienced an in-flight emergency and its ejections seats failed to deploy. The crew, in that case, landed safely.

Washington risks losing the Turkish arms market if it continues to delay the delivery of F-35s agreed upon with Ankara, as Turkey can simply switch to buying warplanes from Russia, RT was told.

"If the US fails to ship the jets to Turkey, Ankara can certainly buy the Su-35s from Russia instead," Viktor Litovkin, a military analyst with the Moscow-based TASS news agency, told RT.

"The US will end up losing the arms market in Turkey should that happen;"

Both aircraft have comparable characteristics, Litovkin said, adding that Moscow wouldn't risk leaking sensitive military technology because the jet's software is hard to crack. It would not require much effort to smoothly integrate the planes into the Turkish military either.

The US is projecting its own plans against Venezuela on Moscow, surmising about "military contingents" and "operations," the Russian Foreign Ministry said, adding that Russian specialists have clear and open goals in the country.

"It looks like Washington is judging by itself, trying to ascribe its own plans it has against this country to Moscow. Yet again, they arrogantly announce they have 'all option on the table,'" foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement on Saturday. She added that Russian specialists in Venezuela are not "military contingent" which Moscow made clear from the very beginning.

The US' unsubstantiated alarm over an imaginary Russian "military contingent" deployed to Venezuela is an example of the utmost hypocrisy, given its own activities in South America.

There are few people in this world more odious than French President Emmanuel Macron after his behavior this week. I'm sure there are child molesters who are worse. But as a man who is pivotal in the future of hundreds of millions of people, his decision to order the French military to quell the Yellow Vests protests with live ammunition is simply vile.

Macron outed himself as the very symbol of what animates the globalist elite he represents.

Disdain.

The disdain he holds for the people he leads is palpable. It's as palpable for his disdain for the British who voted for Brexit. To him the EU is all, the EU is inevitable and when faced with the choice of serving France or serving the EU, he chooses the EU every time.

That is what led him to this disastrous decision to deploy the French military to the streets for the first time since 1948 with orders to shoot protestors.

And that disdain is so complete that he doesn't realize what happens if even one of those men goes too far and takes the President at his word. Thankfully, that did not happen.

It is no secret that the rise of the Belt and Road Initiative has created a positive dynamic for international relations, seriously challenging the Western technocratic system that has come to dominate the Trans-Atlantic region under financial and bureaucratic dictatorship.

While many branches of the Belt and Road Initiative - which officially united with Russia's Eurasian Economic Union in 2015 - have manifested across Europe in the form of rail lines and ports, to this day no actual agreement has been reached between European powers and China.

As President Xi Jinping's trip to Europe from March 22-28 has demonstrated, there is for the first time a sense that the post-industrial society dominant in the West since the 1971 floating of the dollar is no longer the dismal fate of nations.

Xi Jinping has carried the Belt and Road Initiative into the heart of Europe, a lifeline for all patriots who wish to survive the coming financial collapse. As of Saturday March 23, the first G7 country has officially joined this program, with Italy's Prime Minister Conte signing his country onto the historic Memorandum of Understanding with China, setting a great precedent for other member-states trapped within the Euro currency cage.

The German government cannot decide whether to continue its arms embargo against Saudi Arabia. The ban on exports is due to expire this week, and Paris is pressuring Berlin to lift it.

Germany's government coalition is split on whether to maintain the ban on arms sales to Saudi Arabia in the face of increasing pressure from France.

The temporary embargo, imposed in November, is due to expire at the end of this week, but a meeting of the national security council (Chancellor Angela Merkel and her senior ministers) ended inconclusively on Wednesday, according to the dpa news agency.

The government parties, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD), have agreed to discuss the issue further, though it remains unclear when the cabinet will meet again.

In the wake of the New Zealand mosque attacks, links have emerged between the shooter, Brenton Tarrant, and a Ukrainian ultra-nationalist, white supremacist paramilitary organization called the Azov Battalion. Tarrant's manifesto alleges that he visited the country during his many travels abroad, and the flak jacket that Tarrant wore during the assault featured a symbol commonly used by the Azov Battalion. Tarrant's transnational ties go beyond Ukraine, however. Tarrant claimed that he was in touch with Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist, and he took trips throughout Europe, including the Balkans, visiting sites that symbolized historical battles between Christians and Muslims. During the video of his attack he could be heard listening to a song that glorified Bosnian-Serb war criminal Radovan Karadzic, and his gun featured racial messages and names of white supremacists from around the world.

The Azov Battalion is emerging as a critical node in the transnational right-wing violent extremist (RWE) network. This group maintains its own 'Western Outreach Office' to help recruit and attract foreign fighters that travel to train and connect with people from like-minded violent organizations from across the globe. Operatives from the outreach office travel around Europe to promote the organization and proselytize its mission of white supremacy. In July 2018, German-language fliers were distributed among the visitors at a right-wing rock festival in Thuringia, inviting them to be part of the Azov battalion: 'join the ranks of the best' to 'save Europe from extinction.' It has also established youth camps, sporting recreation centers, lecture halls, and far-right education programs, including some that teach children as young as 9 years old military tactics and far-right ideology. This aggressive approach to networking serves one of the Azov Battalion's overarching objectives to transform areas under its control in Ukraine into the primary hub for transnational white supremacy.

The U.S State Department special operator for Venezuela, Elliot Abrams has revealed that Venezuela is already in possession numerous highly effective S-300 (Antey 2500 version) systems. This makes a military campaign against Venezuela highly unlikely, given the high-importance of air-cover for any boots on the ground, and the high effectiveness of the S-300 system. It also explains the decision of OAS member states Columbia and Brazil not to resort to military intervention against the Bolivarian Republic - a jungle war without air-cover would be extraordinarily costly in terms of casualties and the resulting social and political unrest. While the U.S military has known of this, until Abrams statement today there was a reluctance to report the problems posed by this, amid Trump's war-drums surrounding his alleged 'all options' approach to Venezuela.

Previously, FRN relayed a report from a private Israeli satellite giving the locations of the S-300 systems then believed to be in movement to strategic locations. While the source was questionable regarding alleged piece movement, it led to some confusion as to whether Venezuela indeed possessed the systems at all.

Here's something that might surprise you. In the last few days, three separate surveys have been released showing that a majority (or near-majority) of Americans still think Donald Trump colluded with Russia. As you know, this does not square with the findings of the Mueller Report which were released (in part) over the weekend by Attorney General William Barr. The critical passage we are referring to is this:

"The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."

That's pretty clear, isn't it? No conspiracy, no coordination, no collusion. End of story, right?

Wrong. For some reason, the probe has failed to change people's minds even though the "investigation employed 19 lawyers, 40 FBI agents, issued 2,800 subpoenas, executed 500 search warrants, and took 2 years. And even though special counsel Robert Mueller is widely regarded as a first-rate prosecutor and a man of unshakable integrity. Even so, a large percentage of Americans still believe Trump is guilty. Go figure? Take a look at this clip from a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll released on Tuesday:

In an article from a few years ago, I noted the likelihood of a "myriad of new consequences induced by the U.S. and Russian interventions in Iraq and Syria. They are very unlikely to be good. One can only hope that they will be limited to a slight escalation of the 'new cold war' rather than its transformation into a hot one." It was feared that great power meddling in these regions' politics, intended to increase or maximize power, is likely to bring unintended, unmanageable, and potentially catastrophic consequences further down the road. While as yet not catastrophic in terms of its own consequences, U.S. President Donald trump's recent decision to recognize of Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights appears to one of those consequences. Nonetheless, it is a regrettable decision driven by a combination of motives, some emotional, others ideological, others driven by geopolitical interests as understood by the present elite through its 'lone superpower' lens. The decision strikes a fifth, even fatal blow (if one has not already been delivered) to one of the post-Cold War - indeed post-Congress of Vienna principles of the international order (ironically laid down Russian Tsar Alexander I in league with Austria and Prussia after the Napoleonic wars): the inviolability of state borders.

Trump's emotions often get the better of him. One need only read a biography of him, watch him in debates, or his look at his less than presidential tweets. In this case, however, the emotional impetus, is more likely to have come from the old guardians of the neocon order. Such anti-Russian hawks around him sought revenge for Putin's annexation of Crimea, which somewhat foiled the West's 'capture' of Ukraine in the February 2014 Maidan uprising. Now, Washington has taken revenge for that and for Russia's supplanting it as the force that will decide the future of Syria. Put simply: Washington takes 'Russia's Kiev' - Moscow takes Crimea (and maybe Donbass?), Moscow takes Syria back from the clutches of Washington, Washington gives Israel the Golan. Take that. Trump likely went along because of some sympathies for Israel and the need to compensate for the decline in his own domestic political resulting from his decision to cut American losses and reverse a failed Obama administration policy, which he inherited.