The escalating trade friction between the United States and China is opening the door for Russian producers to enter the Chinese market, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at the global investment forum in Moscow on Wednesday.

"According to WTO estimates, the mutual restrictions recently imposed by G20 countries reduced global trade by almost $500 billion. Is anyone interested in this, including such a large economy as the US? For us this creates certain opportunities," Putin said, explaining that Russia will supply soybeans to China instead of the US.

"The United States supplied in huge quantities, now we will deliver. We agreed with our Chinese friends that we'll supply poultry meat and some other goods. But in fact the Americans themselves voluntarily abandoned this market, a very huge one..," the Russian president stressed.

On the heels of another alleged chemical attack in Syria - the Western media has responded with skepticism - even silence. This acutely different response to its regular "chemical weapons" hysteria is because unlike previous incidents, it appears this most recent attack was blatantly carried out by Western-backed militants operating in Idlib, Syria.

While evidence of this most recent alleged attack must still be collected and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has yet to arrive and carry out its investigation, it should be remembered that none of this was previously required by either the Western media to create a storm of hysteria accusing perpetrators - mainly Damascus - and demanding a Western military response, or by Western leaders who would promptly carry out such military responses.

John Podesta, the former chairman of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign whose private emails were infamously published by WikiLeaks, seems to have pivoted into a new arena: Climate change punditry.

Readers may recall that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange claimed "a 14-year-old kid could have hacked" Podesta's emails because he had once used the word "password" as his computer password and responded to phishing emails.

Now, the newly self-styled expert on climate change has taken aim at the Trump administration for its "politicization of climate science" in the United States. The article comes just days after President Donald Trump dismissed a report on the dangers of climate change which was produced by his own administration. Responding to the report, Trump told journalists: "I don't believe it."

If the politicization of climate science is something Podesta is worried about, perhaps he should have let someone else write the Guardian article. After all, Clinton's former campaign chairman is hardly the most apolitical person to be wheeled out to convince the doubters and deniers of global warming.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office has informed a federal court that Paul Manafort violated his plea agreement by repeatedly lying to investigators. Prosecutors thus consider the agreement null and void and have asked the court to set a sentencing date immediately.

The alleged breach was outlined in a brief submission to district judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington, and reported by the New York Times Monday evening. The submission by Andrew Weissmann and other lawyers on Mueller's team does not describe Manafort's allegedly false statements, other than to say that they involve "a variety of subject matters." Prosecutors are planning to file a sentencing memorandum "that sets forth the nature of the defendant's crimes and lies, including those after signing the plea agreement."

In the submission, prosecutors acknowledge that Manafort "believes he has provided truthful information and does not agree with the government's characterization or that he has breached the agreement."

On the surface, it doesn't seem that Manafort's dispute can get him very far. But when we look closer, we realize that this is about more than a plea; it is about a pardon.

More than 17 years after US troops entered Afghanistan and overthrew the Taliban, a Sunni Islamic fundamentalist political movement, the country is still in a state of disarray.

Ahmed Rashid, a journalist and the best-selling author of "Pakistan on the Brink: The Future of America, Pakistan, and Afghanistan" and several books on Afghanistan and Central Asia, including "The Resurgence of Central Asia: Islam or Nationalism," joined Radio Sputnik's Loud & Clear Tuesday to discuss the situation in Afghanistan.

​"It's very depressing, quite frankly," Rashid told hosts John Kiriakou and Brian Becker, referring to the fact Afghanistan has for a long time been in a state of political turmoil, with the government unable to establish full control over the country's territory due to various terrorist factions.

In 2017, after extremely tenuous efforts by Afghanistan's national army to thwart terrorist attacks, US President Donald Trump announced a resolution to send more troops to the war-torn state, while also appealing to NATO members to assist by increasing the numbers of their servicemen present in the war zone.

"I think a lot of advice was given to the Americans when they first came into Afghanistan, especially on reconstruction, rehabilitation by people like myself try to give the [then-US President George W.] Bush administration a proper direction. Unfortunately, they did not take that advice. Of course, the biggest mistake they made is going into Iraq; and, of course, by doing so, they took away the best American troops and forces from Afghanistan to Iraq, and those troops never returned for another seven to eight years later, when [then-US President Barack] Obama sent in troops," Rashid said.

I've noticed some journalism recently that owes a debt to the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Random links are assembled Watergate-style, and it's often pretty believable ... until you get to a subject you know a bit about.

Carole Cadwalladr of the Observer has been joining the dots and last weekend published a lengthy piece under the headline "Who is the real Nigel Farage ... and why won't he answer my questions?" The piece describes her exhaustive attempts to ask the former leader of UKIP awkward questions, including following him all the way to Australia. Reading it made me wonder why the question was needed in the headline, because the reason seems pretty obvious to me. He doesn't want to because she's mean to him.

The Observer labels Farage "Mr Brexit", which we can assume is not meant to be a compliment, but what's really being suggested is he's Mr Kremlin, or one of them, because there's loads of them.

Cadwalladr came to prominence for her work outing the alleged nefarious activities of data devils Cambridge Analytica, and is now embarked on the journalistic equivalent of attempting to find a 'Theory of Everything'; that is to say, she's trying to link everything back to the Kremlin. And good luck to her, because it's a competitive field.

President Trump ripped into Obama and his administration for 'spying' on his presidential campaign, claiming if the same had happened to the former president it would be considered treason, audio tapes obtained by DailyMail.com reveal.

In Trump's Enemies: How the Deep State Is Undermining the Presidency, authors Corey Lewandowski, Trump's campaign manager, and David Bossie, deputy campaign manager and part of the transition team, sat down with Trump for a 45-minute interview, covering a wide-range of topics, including the Mueller probe, fake news and his strained relationship with Obama.

When asked if he believed Obama knew that his appointed CIA chief John Brennan and director of national intelligence (DNI) James Clapper were conducting surveillance on citizens, specifically members of his campaign, Trump said he believed the former president was aware of what they were doing.

Trump responded: 'Personally, I think he knew. Yeah. Just remember what they did.

'Let me put it this way: if the shoe were on the other foot, and the same thing happened to him, it would be treason and they'd be locked up for 100 years.'

With the US, EU and NATO all bolstering claims of "Russian aggression" - in face of contrary evidence - the real danger is that the Kiev regime will be emboldened to carry out more reckless provocations leading to all-out war.

It seems indisputable that the three Ukrainian Navy vessels were dispatched last Sunday in order to instigate a security response from Russian maritime border forces. In contrast to normal procedures for passage clearance through the Kerch Strait, the Ukrainian warships refused to communicate with Russian controls and acted menacingly inside Russia's Black Sea territorial limits.

At a United Nations Security Council emergency meeting on Monday, the US, Britain and France pointedly refused to take on board Russia's legal argument for why it felt obliged to detain the Ukrainian boats and 24 crew. The Western powers automatically sided with the version of events claimed by President Petro Poroshenko - that the Ukrainian Navy was attacked unlawfully by Russia.

The US, EU and NATO denounced Russia's "aggression" and demanded that the Ukrainian vessels and crew be repatriated immediately, even though under Russian law there is a case for prosecution.

It is the West's refusal to acknowledge facts that is part of the problem. Russia is continually accused of "annexing" Crimea in 2014 instead of the Western powers recognizing that the Black Sea peninsula voted in a constitutionally held referendum to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation. Crimea was prompted to take that historic step because the US, EU and NATO had only the month before backed an illegal coup in Kiev against the elected Ukrainian government. That coup brought to power the present Kiev regime led by Poroshenko and a parliament dominated by neo-Nazi parties.

Russia is moving away from the US dollar, but not to the detriment of its own interests, Russian President Vladimir Putin said while speaking at the global investment forum in Moscow on Wednesday.

The Russian president called on the United States to abandon the policy of unilateral sanctions and seek common ground.

"We are not setting the target of moving away from the dollar - the dollar is moving away from us, and those who take respective (sanctions) decisions are shooting themselves not just in the foot, but slightly higher, as such instability in calculations in dollars creates a desire of many global economies to find alternative reserve currencies and create settlement systems independent of the dollar," Putin said.

The Russian economy has adapted to difficulties and is feeling confident; investors have no doubts about its stability, added Putin.

"I think, there is an understanding that despite any crises and even artificially-created difficulties, the Russian economy is adapting to these difficulties, feeling confident, creating conditions for its own internal development," said the Russian president.

A senior Ukip MEP has announced he is leaving the party over its growing links to former EDL leader Tommy Robinson.

Patrick O'Flynn said he had tried to dissuade Ukip's leadership from its "apparent and growing fixation" with the far-right activist, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.

Unexpectedly, Mr O'Flynn, the party's former economics spokesperson, said he would be joining the continuity SDP (Social Democratic Party), which has practically zero elected representatives at any other level of government.

Ukip has been beset by huge internal strife since the EU referendum in 2016, careering through a succession of short-lived leaders, losing swathes of councillors, and tanking in the polls.

The latest row to hit the party emerged last week after current leader, MEP Gerard Batten, appointed Mr Robinson, a prominent media figure in so-called "alt-right" circles as an advisor. The decision was immediately condemned by some factions in the party, including former leader Nigel Farage.