Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a law regulating legal protection of a foreign state and its property in the Russian Federation, and the text of the document has been posted on the official website of legal information.

Russian legislation is currently based on the concept of absolute immunity, which means that the property of a foreign state is not arrested and a court ruling against it is not enforced.

The law for the first time sets the limits of immunity for foreign states and their property in the Russian Federation and defines cases when the state and its property do not enjoy jurisdictional immunity.

The document has been developed in line with modern approaches and court practice of foreign states, and its adoption will boost the efficiency of judicial protection of Russia's interests and property when considering disputes.

Journalist Seymour Hersh's new report on contradictions between President Obama and the US military regarding rebels in Syria was a bombshell. Hersh spoke with RT about the US military's view of Syria's Bashar Assad and Obama's relationship with Turkey.

Writing for the London Review of Books, Hersh reported that, in a classified document from Summer 2013, the highest echelons of the US military establishment outlined their opposition to the Obama administration's strategy of arming so-called "moderate" rebels to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad. From 2013 to September 2015, in an effort to truly counter extremists in Syria, US military leaders fed US intelligence to Russia, Germany, and Israel, which then sent it to Assad, he reported.

A standard technique by the aristocracy and its agents is to pretend that the existing government is too progressive, that it's pandering to the masses, not doing the 'right' thing, which the 'superior' people know that it ought to be doing — and which, coincidentally, will boost the wealth of the rich (and this wealth will then trickle down to everybody, as aristocrats routinely promise will happen). Here's an example of it:

On December 10th, the far-right Rosemary Righter ("Righter" is her actual name, not merely her ideology), of Rupert Murdoch's London Times, presented an opinion-piece in America's Politico (which itself derives from Republican Joe Albritton's now-defunct Washington DC conservative newspaper the Star), titled, "NATO's 'Obama problem': The alliance is hamstrung by the least Atlanticist president since World War II."

Her point in it is that the current U.S. President, who calls himself a Democrat (and so is unacceptable to Republicans no matter how right-wing he might actually be), lacks the requisite passion for war against the 'threat' from Russia.

She says: "Obama, the least Atlanticist president in America's postwar history, viewed NATO as a Cold War relic and radically shrank the U.S. military presence in Europe." But, that, "Then, in March 2014, Russia invaded Crimea, annexing it within 30 days on the pretext of a referendum held under conditions of armed occupation. Having openly carved off one slice of Ukraine, Putin then set about fomenting and arming a separatist rebellion in the country's Donbas region, brazenly denying the involvement of Russian troops."

That's a string of lies; so, here are the facts, to show, from this example, how brazenly the agents of the aristocracy lie (and click onto the link here for anything about which you have any doubt regarding the given allegation's veracity):

The clan relations principle has been a prime factor in business affairs for centuries in numerous Islamic and Middle Eastern countries.

Unfortunately, in recent months we've often witnessed evidence that in Turkey the family of Tayyip Erdogan has been transformed in some sort of carnivorous octopus that has not simply entangled the Turkish economy and politics, but has also extended its tentacles far beyond the state.

The US media continues printing reams of unverifiable nonsense about the American Muslim husband-and-wife team found posthumously guilty in trial-by-media of murdering 14 state workers at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California on December 2nd, 2015.

Meanwhile, citizen journalists in the free and alternative media struggle to learn at least some of the facts. The InvestmentWatch Blog have picked out some interesting police reports from the police scanner feed in San Bernardino that day. Supporting what we reported in our earlier analysis of the San Bernardino massacre, one police officer can be heard reporting at 26:27:

"We have two witnesses who watched the whole thing. They said there are three shooters with rifles, without a doubt. They said there are definitely three."

At 52:28, there is a report of "two males, race unknown, removing black clothing on Hunt Lane at the bridge overpass." On the map below, you'll see that this location is south of both the site of the massacre and the slaying of whoever was shot up in that black SUV. Who were these two men? Two of the three gunmen, perhaps?

The US aristocracy's control over all the mainstream 'news' is ironclad - and this includes the political magazines, such as National Review, and The Nation; as well as 'intellectual' magazines, such as Harpers and The Atlantic. American 'news' media stifle democracy in America; they're not part of democracy, in America. They're like poison that's presented as being 'medicine' instead. Suckers don't just swallow it; they come back for more.

Here was the shocking admission that was made by the US Defense Department's press-spokesman at his 18 November 2015 presentation, in which he voluntarily acknowledged that the US had not previously destroyed any of the thousands of oil tank-trucks that were transporting ISIS's stolen oil out from Iraq and from Syria - the stolen-oil sales that bring $2 billion per year into ISIS coffers:

This is our first strike against tanker trucks, and to minimize risks to civilians, we conducted a leaflet drop prior to the strike. We did a show of force, by - we had aircraft essentially buzz the trucks at low altitude.

So, I do have copy of the leaflet, and I have got some videos, so why don't you pull the leaflet up. Let me take a look at it so I can talk about it.

As you can see, it's a fairly simple leaflet, it says, «Get out of your trucks now, and run away from them». A very simple message.

And then, also, «Warning: airstrikes are coming. Oil trucks will be destroyed. Get away from your oil trucks immediately. Do not risk your life».

And so, these are the leaflets that we dropped - about 45 minutes before the airstrikes actually began. Again, we combine these leaflet drops with very low altitude passes of some of our attack aviation, which sends a very powerful message»

So: not only had the US previously avoided destroying ISIS's main source of income (other than multimillion-dollar donations made by members of the royal families of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, and Kuwait - all of whom are protected by the US), but, when the US now started to bomb those tank-trucks filled with stolen oil, the US warned in advance the drivers, who were also assets to the jihadist cause the US pretended to oppose, and thus were enemies of the public (and were participants in the evils of ISIS). The US Department of Defense (DOD) wanted to protect them - not to kill them. Wow!! And the US totally ignored the need to choke off the financing of ISIS, which pays their fighters etc. Can any hypocrisy exceed this? If the United States were a democracy, its press would have been focusing on this issue for a week. The US protecting ISIS's financial base, and assets, has mind-boggling implications.

China's legislature passed the country's first anti-terrorism law on Sunday, making it legal for the People's Liberation Army to take part in counter-terrorism missions abroad.

The law will take into effect basic principles for counter-terrorism operations and in order to strengthen measures of prevention and punishment the departments may collaborate with overseas governments and international organizations in holding policy dialogues, communicating on intelligence information, enforcing the law and regulating international capital.

The Obama administration's agenda in Syria hit roadblocks from his military generals, who had a "more realistic" view of the war, an American political analyst says. President Barack Obama appears to have made "backroom deals" with Turkey and Israel to remove President Bashar al-Assad from power, but his military and intelligence advisers warned of the consequences of that plan, Mark Glenn said in an interview on Thursday.

In an investigative report, published in the January 7, 2016 edition of the London Review of Books, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh wrote that Obama ignored warnings from senior military and intelligence officials that the fall of Assad would lead to "chaos" and extremist militants taking over Syria.

"Barack Obama's repeated insistence that Bashar al-Assad must leave office -- and that there are 'moderate' rebel groups in Syria capable of defeating him -- has in recent years provoked quiet dissent, and even overt opposition, among some of the most senior officers on the Pentagon's Joint Staff," Hersh said. Hersh cited a highly-classified report by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2013 which warned the White House about the dire consequences of the push to topple the Assad government.

"Even though there may have been this difference of opinion, this rift, between Obama and his military men... nevertheless, at the end of the day, Syria has been made closer to the intended goal that Obama had set out to achieve which was the destabilization of another country in the Middle East," Glenn told Press TV. "250,000 Syrians have been killed, millions more have been displaced and made homeless, Syria is a shambles in terms of its infrastructure and stability, and in that regard—at least as far as the United States and Israel are concerned—a large part of the agenda has been accomplished," he noted.

Greek and Turkish jets engaged in a brief dogfight over the Aegean Sea on Tuesday after Turkish aircraft violated Greek national air space several times.

A formation of six Turkish jets, flanked by two CN-235 aircraft that were not in formation, violated Greek air space nine times, according to Greek defense officials.

In all cases the Turkish jets were chased off by Greek aircraft. Two of the eight Turkish aircraft were armed.

The violations were the first since early December following a minor diplomatic spat between the two Aegean neighbors after a message on Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras's Twitter account accused Turkish jets of repeated transgressions in the Aegean.

The Israeli Army has admitted that they used crop-dusters to kill hundreds of acres of Palestinian crops, claiming that it was to "enable security operations."

Palestinian officials have stated that over 420 acres of land inside the Gaza strip were damaged by the poisons sprayed to kill vegetation.

"For years now, the IDF has unilaterally maintained a lethal 'no-go zone' on the Palestinian side of the border with Gaza. Now, it seems, it has also implemented a 'no-grow zone,'" Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man wrote for +972.