Putin also sees the social excesses of multiculturalism and secularism in the West as representing a failure of liberalism.

"The liberal idea has become obsolete. ... (Liberals) cannot simply dictate anything to anyone as they have been attempting to do over the recent decades."

Such was the confident claim of Vladimir Putin to the Financial Times on the eve of a G-20 gathering that appeared to validate his thesis.


Consider who commanded all the attention at the Osaka summit.

The main event was Trump's meeting with China's Xi Jinping and their agreement to renew trade talks. Xi runs an archipelago of detention camps where China's Uighur Muslims and its Kazakh minority have their minds coercively "corrected."

A major media focus at the summit was Trump's meeting with Putin where he playfully admonished the Russian president not to meddle again in our 2020 election. The two joked about how both are afflicted with a media that generates constant fake news.

A group of 29 MEPs from Nigel Farage's Brexit Party symbolically turned their backs on the European anthem as they were sworn in during the EU Parliament's opening ceremony on Tuesday.

As the newly elected politicians took their seats for the first time, they turned around as the European anthem 'Ode to Joy' rang out in the parliament building in Strasbourg.

The protest appeared to get under the skin of the parliament's president Antonio Tajani. "Rising to your feet is a matter of respect," Tajani said. "It does not mean that you necessarily share the views of the European Union. Even when you listen to the anthem of another country you rise to your feet."

No one is talking about it openly, but, let us face it: those U.S.-made planes are crashing; the performance of Apple phones and computers is falling far behind those made by Huawei and other Chinese companies. Lenovo took over IBM and is doing extremely well. NASA is absolutely incapable of building decent rockets that would be able to deliver people or even satellites to space, cheaply and safely.

In the field of electric automobiles, China is far, far ahead. In fact, anyone who visits a major or secondary Chinese city, would be shocked to see that the implementation of 'zero emission' vehicles there is not something that is in the planning stage, it has for several years been a dream come true, reality: dozens of Chinese cities already have an excellent network of metro trains, of ecological electric buses, and of enormous public sidewalks that encourage people to stroll and remain healthy. Even police cars in China are electric.

Russia is doing extremely well, in several fields. In fact, it is at the vanguard, when it comes to such grounds as science and culture. Those days of 'humiliation' of the Gorbachev and Yeltsin era are far back, when Moscow naively believed Thatcherites and Reaganites! Russia is rolling: now producing and exporting excellent, often organic food. Its icebreakers are opening new paths for both people and goods. Russian space rockets are second to none, and its passenger airplanes are back in the skies. Nuclear and other power plants are helping to supply energy to many countries, all over the world.

You name it; China and Russia are producing it, developing it, helping to create it! Both nations are cooperating, scientifically, working for people, not just for business.

Despite the fact that Muscat and Tel Aviv have no official diplomatic relations, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Oman in October 2018, in what his office touted as "a significant step" towards implement Netanyahu's policy "on deepening relations with the states of the region".

Head of the Mossad, Israel's intelligence service Yossi Cohen told the Herzliya Conference on Tuesday that "just recently, renewal of formal relations with Oman was declared", referring to "the establishment of a representative office of the foreign ministry in that country".

He described the renewal in bilateral ties as "only the visible tip of a much broader secret effort", saying that apart from Israel's historic treaties with Jordan and Egypt, other Arab countries had covertly joined "the states of peace, some of them in an unseen manner".

"We do not yet have with them official peace treaties but there is already a communality of interests, broad cooperation and open channels of communication," Cohen pointed out.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry has not commented on the Mossad chief's remarks yet.

This comes after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Oman in late October 2018 to discuss "a number of issues of mutual interest to achieve peace and stability in the Middle East", according to a joint statement by Netanyahu and Oman's Sultan Qaboos bin Said.

Will President Trump switch up his ticket in 2020? The Wall Street Journal editorial page, bastion of the establishment right, certainly hopes so. A little over a week ago, it called for former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley to replace the dutiful Mike Pence as vice president. But there's well-placed chatter in Washington that suggests the president will take a different route. Trump does indeed feel he needs VP change, but it is not Nikki Haley he is considering. It is Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

The Trump 2020 campaign needs panache, not more cash. If Trump wants to make a switch - as both his predecessors, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, flirted with doing - why would he lean further into the establishment?

Here's why it would make sense for the president to just go all the way — and name Carlson his running mate.

First, Tucker gets Trump. The duo have personal chemistry far exceeding the rapport that Pence or Haley enjoy. Haley bitterly opposed Trump during the 2016 primary and a former senior administration official has long informed me that her hiring during the transition was a 'keep your enemies closer' affair. In Carlson, Trump would get to anoint an heir apparent he actually likes.

PLO calls for international intervention as Friedman and Greenblatt take part in ceremony to inaugurate ancient Jewish pilgrimage road excavated in Silwan neighborhood.

The Palestine Liberation Organization on Sunday slammed the participation of senior US officials at a ceremony opening an ancient Jewish pilgrimage road excavated in the Silwan neighborhood of East Jerusalem as participation in a "war crime," and said the Trump administration was fanning the flames of the conflict.

US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman joined other Israeli and American bigwigs in symbolically breaking down a wall, which led to the "Pilgrimage Road," a now-subterranean stairway that was said to have served as a main artery for Jews to the Temple Mount thousands of years ago.

Archaeologists have been excavating at the City of David National Park in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan for the past eight years. The area has several tiny Jewish enclaves.

Headlined "U.S. Seeks Other Ways to Stop Iran Shy of War," the article was tucked away on page A9 of a recent New York Times. Still, it caught my attention. Here's the first paragraph:

"American intelligence and military officers are working on additional clandestine plans to counter Iranian aggression in the Persian Gulf, pushed by the White House to develop new options that could help deter Tehran without escalating tensions into a full-out conventional war, according to current and former officials."

Note that "Iranian aggression." The rest of the piece, fairly typical of the tone of American media coverage of the ongoing Iran crisis, included sentences like this: "The C.I.A. has longstanding secret plans for responding to Iranian provocations." I'm sure I've read such things hundreds of times without ever really stopping to think much about them, but this time I did. And what struck me was this: rare is the moment in such mainstream news reports when Americans are the "provocative" ones (though the Iranians immediately accused the U.S. military of just that, a provocation, when it came to the U.S. drone its Revolutionary Guard recently shot down either over Iranian air space or the Strait of Hormuz). When it comes to Washington's never-ending war on terror, I think I can say with reasonable confidence that, in the past, the present, and the future, the one phrase you're not likely to find in such media coverage will be "American aggression."

Does Hunter Biden's crack use humanize his father, or serve as another black mark in the ledger against the Democratic frontrunner? Mainstream media has put the spin machine into top gear as Joe Biden sinks in the polls.

Hunter, the youngest son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, has spilled his guts to the New Yorker, weaving a sordid tale of addiction, affairs, and alcoholism that the outlet has heroically tried to spin as a positive. After Joe Biden's abysmal debate performance, the alleged frontrunner - whom even the New York Times has admitted has all the flaws of Hillary Clinton in 2016, plus the deadly "white male" factor - needs all the help he can get.

And the New Yorker has gamely tried to frame the younger Biden's troubles as a plus for dad. It noted that most candidates are "relentlessly bland" but the former VP - whom mainstream media has been consistently calling the 2020 Democratic frontrunner since his campaign launch, despite a scandal-studded history that would sink multiple less-well-heeled candidates - has "responded to tragedy" and "learned from it."

U.S. President Donald Trump has described Afghanistan as a "lab for terrorists," saying in a television interview that if the United States withdrew its military forces from the country, he would still leave a "very strong intelligence" presence behind.

"I call it the Harvard of terrorists," Trump said about Afghanistan and referring to the prestigious private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Trump made the remarks in an interview conducted during the weekend with Fox News that was broadcast on July 1. The interview was recorded before a truck-bomb attack by Taliban fighters in Kabul on July 1 that killed at least six people and wounded 105.

It was broadcast after U.S. special peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad met on July 1 for a seventh round of peace talks with Taliban representatives in Qatar. The focus of the talks has been a Taliban demand that foreign forces leave Afghanistan and a U.S. demand for a guarantee that Afghanistan will not be used as a base for attacks elsewhere.

Russia is calling on the so-called EU big three to recognise their responsibility for preserving the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), including through enabling Iran to sell its oil, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday.

"I would very much like our European colleagues to fully understand their responsibility for preserving the JCPOA. They have very important commitments under this plan, including to ensure Iran's economic interests, enabling it to sell oil and receive revenue, which is an integral component of the agreement", Lavrov stressed.

The minister also noted that Tehran had exceeded its enriched uranium stockpile limits due to US sanctions.

"In order to understand the reasons for what is happening now, it is necessary to see the entire picture. Part of these obligations [under the JCPOA] is voluntary commitments undertaken by Iran to comply with the limits of stockpiles of low-enriched uranium and heavy water. But this is necessarily linked with Iran's right... to enrich uranium up to 3.67 percent and produce heavy water, and Iran had the right to sell excesses, which was done... until recently", Lavrov said.