The US has been up in arms over controversial comments made by Benjamin Netanyahu's newly appointed, but not yet approved spokesman. Ran Baratz once accused Barack Obama of anti-Semitism and suggested that Secretary of State John Kerry had the intellect of a 12-year-old.

Predictably, the United States blew a gasket, expressing concern at Netanyahu's appointment.

"His comments about US officials, including the president and Secretary Kerry, we believe were troubling and offensive. We obviously expect government officials from any country, especially our closest allies, to speak respectfully and truthfully about senior US government officials," State Department spokesman John Kirby said.

As head of public diplomacy and media, Baratz, a 42-year-old philosophy, history and Zionist thought lecturer and the founding editor of a conservative news site, will be tasked with revamping Israel's reputation in the world. If Israel's cabinet approves Netanyahu's nomination of Baratz, he will serve as spokesman to the Israeli media and become a close adviser.

Israel has provided the United States with a list of weapons that it would like to have available as part of the US aid package, Israel's Yedioth Ahronoth revealed yesterday.

According to the newspaper the list included a modern aircraft carrier and a squadron of F-15 aircraft as well as material assistance to support Israel's anti-ballistic missile system, Arrow 3.

According to the newspaper Israeli officials have asked for these weapons during closed-door meetings with US officials attended by Defence Minister Moshe Ya'alon and US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter in Washington.

The list of arms exceeded the maximum assistance provided by the United States each year, amounting to nearly $3 billion, therefore it has been referred to US President Barack Obama before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to the White House scheduled for next week, the paper reported.

US officials often mention the location of terrorist positions but they never say where these positions are actually located, the Russian Defense Ministry said Thursday. The statements of various US officials give the impression that the location of terrorists' positions is the United States' most guarded state secret, the Russian Defense Ministry spokesman said.

While giving a speech during a Congress session, US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland claimed that supposedly a large part of the Russian strikes in Syria were aimed not against terrorists, but 'literally targeted in areas where the Assad regime has lost territory.'

"Once again, I emphasize that the Russian air group in Syria is conducting strikes not on regions, but on terrorist infrastructure," Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov stressed.

He reminded that the Russian Defense Ministry had officially handed over comprehensive information with detailed maps to the military attachés of the anti-ISIL coalition led by the US concerning the positions and areas controlled by the terrorists in Syria.

"The information provided by us was not refuted by the State Department or the Pentagon. So, further comments here are quite unnecessary," concluded Konashenkov.

You may recall our run-in with Finnish media outlets earlier this year, when Finnish presstitutes targeted Sott.net with specious accusations in an apparent effort to intimidate us.

When Finnish SOTT (fi.sott.net) editors recently wrote an article about Finnish military historian and honorary doctorate Sampo Ahto's condemning views about US imperialism, and shared it on their Facebook page, the post was subject to the kind of trolling usually only reserved for those who stray too close to the truth.

The reason we're bringing this to your attention is that Finnish mainstream newspaper Lappeenrannan uutiset subsequently published a hit-piece on October 31^st titled: "a man from Lappeenranta had an incident with a Russian troll factory".

In this article by reporter Janne Koivisto, the "Russian troll factory" is our Finnish SOTT site. But extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. So let's take a closer look at this "news" story according to the Finnish newspaper:

Jorma Tyrmi from Lappeenranta was startled last week while using Facebook, when an unusual advertisement came up on the screen. Russia's president Vladimir Putin smiled on the advertisement, which led to an article on a website named Sott.net.

- An interesting thing was, that the ad was paid for. Russia is ready to pay a US business, so it can feed its nonsense to Finnish people, Tyrmi says astonished.

Maybe the Finnish media needs to retake Social Media Activism 101 at the US State Department, because what they describe as an "advertisement" is actually a Facebook link to an article on Finnish Sott.net. The article in question is a write-up about the website Dearputin.com.

So to summarize: some dude called Jorma Tyrmi from Lappeenranta in Finland saw an "advertisement" on the Sott.net Finnish Facebook page, drew the conclusion that it must have been paid for by the Russian government because it contained an image of Putin, became hysterical and called Finnish journalists, who then wrote a story about it. This, dear readers, is the "source" for the dubious claims in the headline of the Finnish newspaper. That's quality journalism right there!

Press TV has interviewed Tighe Barry, an activist with CODEPINK in Washington, to discuss the statements by Doctors Without Borders, also known by its French acronym MSF, saying it has not yet found any evidence that US fighter jets attacked one of its hospitals in Afghanistan's embattled city of Kunduz by mistake and that the raid seems to have had no purpose but to "kill and destroy."

Following is a rough transcription of the interview:

Press TV: This is the one story that seems not be going away for the US, the details only seem to get worse. What kind of pressure do you think this puts on the US for accountability?

Barry: Well without a doubt this puts a lot of pressure on the [US President Barack] Obama administration as far as external foreign affairs is considered. But the fact is that these war crimes have been going on since 2001 and they will continue.

Now the United States is putting boots on the ground in Syria and they are not leaving Afghanistan. The record shows that the United States has committed war crime after war crime. They support war criminals in Israel, in Saudi Arabia and they are implicit in the blood and deaths of many, many people around this globe. Until and unless the world stands up and the people in United States stand up and tell the United States that it can no longer permit the human rights violations; the mass murder that it is committing and allow free and independent panels to investigate these things, all these war crimes will be investigated by the perpetrators.

Western Russia-bashing is not new, though it has never been so counter-productive. Unwilling to go along to get along, Russia's political elite is self-confident when defining what is in the country's interest. This makes the exceptionalists inside the Beltway go mad!

CrossTalking with Vladimir Golstein, Gilbert Doctorow, and Peter Kuznick.

Imagine an arsonist lighting a building ablaze, then turning around, changing into a firefighter's uniform, and running back toward it, not with a fire hose but instead, rolling a drum of gasoline in front of him. Would anyone believe that his intentions are to extinguish the blaze? Or would it be obvious that the goal is to compound the fire, so that no matter how much effort is organized against it, it can never be put out - not until everything is destroyed first?

Meet the Arsonists

The United States has been illegally plying the airspace above Syria for over a year. It has been openly arming, funding, and training terrorists along Syria's borders in Turkey and Jordan, admittedly, for much longer. And before the conflict began in 2011, the United States had conspired as early as 2007, revealed in interviews conducted by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh in his 9-page report "The Redirection," to destabilize and overthrow the government of Syria through the use of sectarian extremists - more specifically, Al Qaeda - with arms and funds laundered through America's oldest and stanchest regional ally, Saudi Arabia.

An eerily familiar sense of regional unease has crept over all the former republics of Yugoslavia.

Slovenian Prime Minister Miro Cerar echoed the Balkan zeitgeist when he warned at a press conference this week that:

"If the migrant crisis is not adequately controlled as agreed at the summit in Brussels there is a possibility of conflict situations between the states of the Western Balkans. It is possible that a small conflict would initiate a wider reaction because of the very difficult recent history (of the region), which is why it is very important that we solve this crisis together as no country can solve this problem by itself."

It seems like everybody knows that something foul is afoot, and the unsettling and anxious mood that has swept over the region is reminiscent of the atmosphere of 1991.

Serbian police say they have arrested several drug and arms traffickers, as well as a fugitive suspect in this year's clashes between police and armed groups in Macedonia.

Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic said Friday the arrests were made in separate police actions throughout the country. He said police confiscated drugs and automatic weapons in the operation.

The Balkan region is a well-known smuggling gate toward Western Europe. Stefanovic says one of the suspects headed a heroin smuggling ring stretching from Turkey to Western Europe, while four others were trafficking arms from Serbia to France.

He says the Macedonia suspect was detained on the border with Kosovo on an international warrant over clashes in northern Macedonia that killed 22 people earlier this year.

"ISIS threatens our way of life and security...We have plans to act militarily against them in the coming days. You will see."

— Turkish Foreign Minister Feridun Sinirlioğlu

A landslide victory in Turkey's November 1 snap elections has removed the last obstacle in President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's drive to war. The surprise outcome of the balloting, which was widely denounced as "unfair and marred by fear and violence by international election observers", has given Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) 49 percent of the vote restoring single-party rule in Ankara. Shortly after the election results were announced, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu called on Turkey's political parties to scrap the existing constitution in order to grant President Erdogan nearly-limitless executive authority.

According to Turkey's Today's Zaman Davutoglu said, "I'm calling on all parties entering parliament to form a new civilian national constitution...Let's work together towards a Turkey where conflict, tension and polarisation are non-existent and everyone salutes each other in peace."

In other words, the balloting is being used to sabotage democracy and establish the supreme power of the president. Less than 24 hours after Erdogan had regained single-party control of the government, he reiterated Davutoglu's appeal for expanding presidential powers through a national referendum.