Within the week, President Trump's sudden announcement of "total" troop withdrawal from Syria has ripped apart the American political system and exposed its fault lines. Trump's decision is intrinsically a sound one. He didn't start the Syrian conflict and he has been on record repeatedly that the US had no business to intervene in it militarily. But his writ as president and commander-in-chief didn't run large. Astoundingly enough, we know now that the Pentagon defied the president who is also the commander-in-chief.

We also know that Trump's defence secretary James Mattis set the scale and scope of the US intervention in Syria. From what was meant to be a limited intervention, Mattis turned it into an open-ended military occupation of Syria. This was despite the fact that the US carries no UN mandate to send forces to Syria. The repeated protests by Damascus, including at the UN, were ignored.

Indeed, the military mission that was originally geared to fight the ISIS morphed into a geopolitical one to counter Iran (and Russia's) presence in Syria. Above all, the US military virtually occupied one-third of Syrian territory and declared it an exclusive region that even Syrian government forces were barred from entering and imposed a "no-fly zone" there. All this constituted a gross violation of international law and UN Charter.

President Trump poked fun at the Obamas on Sunday for building a brick and metal fence around their home in Washington, D.C.

Trump made the remark, referencing the addition the former first couple made to their $8.1 million property in the nation's capital last year as a security precaution after they left the White House, while making the case that the country needs similar structures along its southern border.

"President and Mrs. Obama built/has a ten foot Wall around their D.C. mansion/compound. I agree, totally necessary for their safety and security. The U.S. needs the same thing, slightly larger version!" Trump tweeted.

Brazil's new president Jair Bolsonaro does not mince words. On the eve of his ascension, the right-wing politician and former paratrooper announced over Twitter that he would issue an immediate decree easing gun laws and will work to "fight the Marxist trash" be says is being taught in Brazil's classrooms, according to France24.

The announcements underlined Bolsonaro's desire to break with decades of center-left rule in Brazil, as he prepares to take over from President Michel Temer, a center-right caretaker figure who served the past two years and finished with historic unpopularity.

They also reinforced the similarity between Bolsonaro and US President Donald Trump, who has taken pride in keeping many of his own promises to his base regardless of the bitter national disunity that has resulted.

Bolsonaro, 63, won election in October on an anti-crime, anti-corruption platform.

He triumphed against a candidate from the left-wing Workers Party, which had held the presidency between 2003 and 2016 before graft and financial mismanagement soured its image with voters. A tepid exit from a record-busting recession also spurred appetite for change. -France24

Tech giants will now pay more tax in France, after the country decided not to wait for the rest of the EU to introduce the measure. The so-called GAFA tax targeting major digital firms comes into force on January 1.

The French government hopes to raise €500 million ($572 million) with levies specifically aimed at multinational tech firms, including Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said, announcing the move in December. He stressed that "the tax will be introduced whatever happens."

Paris has been pushing for what it sees as fairer taxation of the big-tech firms in the European Union. Progress on the issue has stalled in Brussels, as the 28-member bloc is divided on imposing the levies on Silicon Valley giants. Any changes must receive unanimous approval by member states.

Critics say that the big-tech firms are making money from European countries' economies, but use their complex structure to route some of their profits to low-tax member states.

Alert to pension fund managers all over the planet-and to everyone else-

"If 1,000 US and global pension fund managers start asking questions it could change everything - like stopping a nuclear war."

That's a statement from former US Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and now president of Solari, Inc., Catherine Austin Fitts, who is a financial analyst like no other in our time.

Among other feats, she has identified a giant sucking black hole in the US government. And what has disappeared down that hole is money. Over the years, at least $20 trillion.

Unaccounted for.

Gone.

If you're a pension fund manager, stop reading this article and immediately switch over to these two articles from Fitts: "The State of Our Pension Funds" and "'FASAB [Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board] Statement 56′: Understanding New Government Financial Accounting Loopholes".

You could begin to see a blinding light that changes your mind and changes your approach to the staggering debt your fund is dealing with. And in the process, you could help lead the way to a peaceful revolution. A far-reaching revolution, in which wide-ranging prosperity, not doom, sits up the road.

The Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) will lay down their arms only after peace returns to Syria, the militia's spokesman Nuri Mahmud said.

Mahmud argued that the weapons supplied by the United States were used to combat terrorists, according to a Jordanian news channel, Al-Hadath.

The YPG said it had handed over the northern city of Manbij to the Syrian army to focus on the fight against the Daesh* terror group east of the Euphrates River.

The surprise withdrawal of 2,000 US troops from Syria was announced after Trump said that the objective to defeat the Daesh terror group had been achieved.

*Daesh (ISIL/ISIS/Islamic State/IS), a terrorist group banned in Russia and a wide number of other countries.

They're undermining his positions and pursuing their own agendas. John Bolton should be the first to go.

President Donald Trump has at last rediscovered his core foreign policy beliefs and ordered the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria. Right on cue, official Washington had a collective mental breakdown. Neocons committed to war, progressives targeting Trump, and centrists determined to dominate the world unleashed an orgy of shrieking and caterwauling. The horrifying collective scream, a la artist Edvard Munch, continued for days.

Trump's decision should have surprised no one. As a candidate, he shocked the Republican Party establishment by criticizing George W. Bush's disastrous decision to invade Iraq and urging a quick exit from Afghanistan. As president, he inflamed the bipartisan War Party's fears by denouncing America's costly alliances with wealthy industrialized states. And to almost everyone's consternation, he said he wanted U.S. personnel out of Syria. Once the Islamic State was defeated, he explained, Americans should come home.

How shocking. How naïve. How outrageous.

2018 was marked by notable and sometimes alarming political, military and security developments around the world. The Middle East, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia and East Asia once again became the scenes of global and intra-regional standoffs. A characteristic feature of the past year was the fact that almost all cross-border regions as well as regions which directly concern the economic and security interests of the USA, the EU, the People's Republic of China and the Russian Federation have been drawn into the confrontation between global forces. This leads to the conclusion that there are no more "safe havens" in today's world.

In the first half of the year, the world was balancing on the brink of a new and wider cycle of violence in the Middle East conflict. Many believed that exactly this could finally destroy the fragile world security order based on the Post Cold-War system of international relations. However, by the end of the year, the situation had changed and confrontation between the key powers has now shifted to Eastern Europe and Asia.

This development is the result of the following factors:

• The situation in Syria has stabilized, as a result of a series of successful military operations by the Syrian-Iranian-Russian alliance and diplomatic measures undertaken in the framework of the Astana format.
• The US and key EU states concentrated their main attention on different regions in various corners of the world. This was conditioned by the interests of the Euro-Atlantic elite and new economic and by the new diplomatic approach of the Trump administration.
• The US changed the focus of its foreign policy towards the active deterrence of China, instead of a possible cooperation. For this reason, the US employed measures to contain the economic expansion of China in the US market as well as in those foreign regions where the interests of US and Chinese corporations competed.
• Germany, the most powerful European economic center, sent strong signals that its interests did not correspond with Euro-Atlantic interests.
• The regime of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and its backers employed active measures to fuel tensions in Eastern Europe and the Black Sea region during the last two months of the year.

With a mere 673 days until the 2020 US presidential election, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren has announced the formation of an "exploratory committee" to consider a run for the highest office in the land.

In American politics jargon, this means the Democratic senator is most definitely running for president. Warren had repeatedly been named as a possible 2020 candidate since 2016 and even earlier, so her candidacy has come as no surprise to pundits.

But as ever, Twitter was there to react to Warren's early announcement, which she made with an accompanying video laying out her 2020 vision.

In recent months, American, Commonwealth and European media have taken aim at China. From fabricated stories of interment camps with "1 million" Uyghir Muslims being detained in them to a more recent New York Times article claiming to have "secret plans" revealing the military dimension of its One Belt, One Road initiative (OBOR), the barrage has been heavy on innuendo and accusations but lacking concrete evidence.

Considering the scale of each accusation, it would be assumed a huge wealth of evidence existed to accompany them. After all, how would China hide a detention network detaining, torturing and executing a "million" people? Or develop complex defence systems with international partners in complete secret?

Yet these stories circulating the West's most prominent newspapers, television networks and online portals aren't simply lacking in a wealth of evidence, they lack any evidence at all.