Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte on Sunday fired vice-president and arch-critic Leni Robredo from her post as overseer of his deadly drugs war, an aide said, just days after calling her a "scatterbrain" not to be trusted with state secrets.

Robredo, 54, lasted less than three weeks as head of Duterte's signature anti-narcotics campaign, which she vowed to reform amid allegations that police were committing crimes against humanity in killing thousands of drug suspects.

"The vice-president resorted to unduly baiting international attention on the matter," Duterte spokesman Salvador Panelo said in a statement announcing Robredo's immediate dismissal.

The U.S. military reportedly attacked four tanker ferries on Saturday that were attempting to smuggle oil from the SDF-held areas in eastern Syria to the Syrian government territories.

According to local reports, the U.S. warplanes targeted these ferries while they were traveling through the southern region of Syria's Euphrates River Valley.

The reports said the U.S. military managed to destroy the four ferries before they could reach their intended destination, resulting in a number of explosions that were heard in the Euphrates River Valley.

The total number of casualties are still unknown at this time.

The developing story about how the US intelligence and national security agencies may have conspired to influence and possibly even reverse the results of the 2016 presidential election is compelling, even if one is disinclined to believe that such a plot would be possible to execute. Not surprisingly perhaps there have been considerable introspection among former and current officials who have worked in those and related government positions, many of whom would agree that there is urgent need for a considerable restructuring and reining in of the 17 government agencies that have some intelligence or law enforcement function. Most would also agree that much of the real damage that has been done has been the result of the unending global war on terror launched by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, which has showered the agencies with resources and money while also politicizing their leadership and freeing them from restraints on their behavior.

If the tens of billions of dollars lavished on the intelligence community together with a "gloves off" approach towards oversight that allowed them to run wild had produced good results, it might be possible to argue that it was all worth it. But the fact is that intelligence gathering has always been a bad investment even if it is demonstrably worse at the present. One might argue that the CIA's notorious Soviet Estimate prolonged the Cold War and that the failure to connect dots and pay attention to what junior officers were observing allowed 9/11 to happen. And then there was the empowerment of al-Qaeda during the Soviet-Afghan war followed by failure to penetrate the group once it began to carry out operations.

On October 17^th, Hillary Clinton did an hour-long podcast interview with David Plouffe, who had been Barack Obama's 2008 Campaign Manager, and she spent over half the time on the topic of Russia's destroying American democracy by using minor political parties to draw votes away from Democratic candidates but not away from Republican candidates, and she also accused Russia of using the internet in order to deceive Democratic Party voters into not voting, or else to vote for more-progressive third parties instead of for the Democratic Party's nominees. Her underlying assumption was that Russia does all of this in order to cause Republican nominees to become elected. Whereas Joseph R. McCarthy, in the 1950s, accused the communist Soviet Union of infiltrating the US Government in order to place Democrats into control of the government, Hillary Clinton now is accusing non-communist Russia of doing something similar, in order to place Republicans in control.

Here will be presented the first full transcript of the complete passage in which Hillary Clinton accused both the Democratic Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard (who has been a Representative in the US House of Representatives for 6 years) and the Green Party leader (who hasn't ever held any elective governmental office) as being "Russian assets"; and, regarding Gabbard, alleged also that Russia is "grooming her to be the third-party candidate." Hillary meant there that Russia, and those two "Russian assets," are planning to do this so as to reduce the votes for whomever will be the Democratic Party's Presidential nominee, and thus to throw the 2020 election to Donald Trump, like Ralph Nader threw the 2000 Presidential election to George W. Bush, by taking more votes away from Gore than away from Bush in both New Hampshire and Florida and thus actually enabling the Republican US Supreme Court to step in and choose Bush to be the US President. But Hillary never alleged that Nader had been "a Russian asset." Maybe there isn't a Russian under every rock, just like there isn't a Jew under every rock. However, bigots can be found almost everywhere, and evil politicians of every political party can play them like a Paderewsky upon the keys. And Obama's former campaign manager played right along with her.

Regarding this podcast, I warn anyone who clicks onto either of the two URLs to that podcast: it blasts one's ears out and has no volume-control on it (at least on my system); so, I advise that, in order to save your ears, it might be safer just to read the transcript that I present of it, below:

Russia has long expressed its concern regarding NATO's deployments of forces near the country's borders, something which has only intensified in the last five years, as well as tendencies to develop military equipment, designed to be deployed in space.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has expressed grave concern about the process of NATO's expansion further to the east, resulting in the deployment of the alliance's military infrastructure close to Russia's borders.

"The world's leading states are actively improving their offensive weaponry. [...] The so-called nuclear missile club, as you all know, is growing in number", the president noted.

Putin further noted that Russia is facing "serious challenges and threats" as global competition is "intensifying and acquiring new shapes" causing uncertainty in the world. He stressed that the US withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 2019, was one of the factors for this "uncertainty".

In an extraordinary move, the Pentagon chief "fired" the Navy secretary Sunday for going outside his chain of command by proposing a "secret agreement with the White House," according to a senior defense official.

The agreement that led to Navy Secretary Richard Spencer's forced resignation involved the case of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, one of three service members facing war crimes allegations whose cases have caused unprecedented tension between the Pentagon and President Donald Trump.

Spencer had appeared to be seeking a way to resolve a standoff between the Pentagon and White House over Gallagher's case, but competing narratives that emerged in the chaotic hours after Spencer's dismissal suggest the depth of the upheaval, disconnection and discord that remains.

Trump suggested on Twitter that Spencer's dismissal had to do with cost overruns and the way Gallagher had been treated by the Navy. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said he asked Spencer to resign because he had lost "trust and confidence in him regarding his lack of candor," according to a Pentagon spokesman.

The latest round of demonstrations comes in response to a statement by former US Ambassador to Lebanon Jeffrey Feltman, who said that "the demonstrations and the reactions to them by Lebanese leaders and institutions fortunately coincide with US interests".


Several dozen Lebanese citizens have over the weekend been protesting near the US Embassy in the capital city of Beirut to express their discontent at what they call US intervention in Lebanon's internal affairs.

The protesters were seen burning US and Israeli flags in front of the embassy.

The United States has called on social-media giants Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to suspend accounts linked to Iranian government leaders until Internet coverage is restored in that country.

"It is a deeply hypocritical regime," Brian Hook, the U.S. special representative for Iran, told Bloomberg News in an interview posted on the official State Department Twitter account.

"It shuts down the Internet while its government continues to use all of these social-media accounts."

British investor Bill Browder has made a name for himself in the West through blaming Moscow for the death of his auditor, Sergey Magnitsky. Der Spiegel has picked apart his story and uncovers it has major credibility problems.

For years Browder - Russian President Vladimir Putin's self-proclaimed "enemy number one" and head of the Hermitage Capital Management fund - has been waging what can only be described as his personal anti-Russian campaign.

The passionate Kremlin critic relentlessly lobbied for sanctions against Russian officials everywhere from the US to Europe - all under the premise of seeking justice for his deceased employee, who died in Russia, while in pre-trial detention, where he'd been placed while accused of complicity in a major tax evasion scheme.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan, who has been nominated to become Washington's next ambassador to Moscow, told Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that an improvement in bilateral ties depends on Moscow's "disavowal of efforts to undermine our democratic processes" and a commitment to peace efforts in Ukraine.


State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said in a statement on November 23 that Sullivan met with the Russian diplomat on the sidelines of the Group of 20 foreign ministers' meeting in Nagoya, Japan.

The statement said Sullivan and Lavrov discussed "a broad range of regional and bilateral issues, including international security challenges such as North Korea and Syria, as well as counterterrorism cooperation and strategic security."

Sullivan reiterated "that improvement in the bilateral relationship is contingent on Moscow's adherence to the Minsk agreements and disavowal of efforts to undermine our democratic processes."