Just days before he leaves office

The National Archives has finally released photos showing then-Vice President Biden meeting with two of first son Hunter Biden's Chinese government-linked business partners — again proving that the president lied about not interacting with his family's foreign patrons.

The photos, released long after their potential political salience and days before Biden retires on Jan. 20, also show Chinese President Xi Jinping grinning as then-Vice President Biden introduced his son during the same December 2013 trip to Beijing.

The Xi-Hunter Biden encounter, which had not previously garnered much attention, appears to have been at a meal Hunter described in an email to his former associate Devon Archer as "pretty amazing" because his dad and China's powerful authoritarian leader "were supposed to spend 2hrs together [but it] stretched to 7hrs. I think they are in love."

Kiev has refused to prolong its five-year contract with Moscow despite appeals from EU states whose energy security is now in jeopardy

Russia has officially stopped supplying gas to the EU through Ukraine as of 8am Moscow time on January 1, after months-long negotiations to extend the transit deal with Kiev fell through. Here is how this development came about and what it means for the European gas market.

What's the deal?

A host of EU states once received Russian pipeline gas via Ukraine's transit network under a five-year contract between Russian energy giant Gazprom and Ukrainian state energy firm Naftogaz signed in 2019. The deal entailed Gazprom transiting 65 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas through Ukraine in 2020 and 40 bcm annually from 2021 to 2024. It expired on December 31.

The Syria story, it seems, is not so simple as 'President Assad fell' and the 'technocratic Salafists' rose to power.

At one level, the collapse was predictable. Assad was known to have been influenced by Egypt and UAE for some years past. They had been urging him to break with Iran and Russia, and to shift to the West. For some 3-4 years he had been incrementally signalling and implementing such a move. Iran especially faced increasing obstacles over operational matters in which they were co-operating with Syrian forces. His shift was meant as a message to Iran.

The financial situation of Syria - after years of U.S. Caesar sanctions, plus the loss of all agricultural and energy revenues seized by the U.S. in occupied north-east Syria - was catastrophic. Syria simply had no economy.

No doubt, reaching out to Israel and Washington was presented to Assad as the only practical exit to his dilemma. 'Normalisation' could lead to the lifting of sanctions, they implored him. And Assad, according to those in touch with him, (even at the eleventh hour before the HTS 'invasion') was believing that Arab States close to Washington would have opted for his continued leadership, rather than see Syria fall prey to Salafist zealots.

To be clear: Moscow and Tehran had warned Assad that his army (as a whole) was too fragile, too underpaid, and too penetrated and bribed by foreign intelligence services, to be expected to defend the state effectively. Assad also was warned repeatedly about the threat from Idlib jihadists planning to take Aleppo, but the President not only ignored the warnings - he rebutted them.

He was offered a very large external military force not once, but twice, even in 'the last days', as Jolani's militia were advancing. Assad refused. "We are strong", he told an interlocutor on the first occasion; yet shortly afterwards, on a second occasion, he admitted: "My army is running away".

Assad was not abandoned by his allies. It was by then too late. He had flip-flopped once too often. Two of the principal actors (Russia and Iran) were frustrated and rendered unable to help - absent Assad's consent.

A Syrian who knew the Assad family, and who spoke with the President at some length just prior the Aleppo invasion, had found him surprisingly sanguine and unflustered - assuring his friend that there were forces enough (2,500) in Aleppo to deal with Jolani's threats, and hinting that President Sissi might be ready to step in with aid for Syria. (Egypt of course feared Muslim Brotherhood Islamists taking power in a former secular Ba'athist state).

The legendary foreign correspondent who has died at the age of 84 was monitored and targeted by a covert British propaganda unit, declassified files show.

Recently declassified files show how the UK government covertly monitored Australian journalist John Pilger, and sought to discredit him by encouraging media contacts to attack him in the press.

Pilger, who died in London on 30 December at the age of 84, was best known for his numerous documentaries exposing US, UK and Australian government policies.

His film, Stealing a Nation, showed how Britain expelled the native population of the Chagos Islands to make way for a US military base, while Death of a Nation exposed how the genocide in East Timor "happened with the connivance of Britain, the US, and Australia".

India has stepped up its lobbying effort against moves in the US Congress to impose curbs on visas for skilled workers that threaten the country's tech sector, which employs more than 3.5 million people.

Speaking to news agency Reuters, Minister of State for the Ministry of Commerce & Industry, Nirmala Sitharaman said India had reached out to the administration of President Donald Trump to stress the importance of India's $150-billion IT services industry to US citizens.

"India's investments in the United States have provided jobs to US citizens," she said in an interview. "That has to be brought to the notice of the US administration."

The comments come days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged Washington to keep an open mind on admitting skilled Indian workers.

As Europeans ring in the New Year, they can look forward to the misery of crippling energy costs and their economies tanking further - all thanks to the NeoNazi regime in Ukraine that elitist Euro leaders deem to be a priority cause for ceaseless hand-outs.

So much for the traditional greeting of "peaceful and prosperous."

NATO's Ukrainian puppet leader Vladimir Zelensky - the sweaty T-shirt guy who gets a privileged seat at every EU summit - is cutting off the last supply route to Europe of Russian gas on New Year's Eve.

This act of sabotage is being done openly and brazenly - with the support of Euro "leaders" who are so deranged by Russophobia and Western imperialist arrogance, that they expect European citizens to endure it for a "war effort" against Russia.

The insufferably money-grubbing Zelensky announced at the last EU leaders' summit in Brussels on December 19 that his regime was not extending the contract to transit Russian gas to the rest of Europe at the end of this year on December 31.

Europe has already been cut off from Russian gas with the U.S. explosive sabotage in 2022 of the Baltic seabed Nord Stream pipelines to Germany. Now, the decades-old Ukrainian transit land pipes are also to be shut off. If ever the bigger picture of what is behind the war in Ukraine was needed, those two moves should explain.

That means yet more soaring energy costs as European countries scramble to find alternative and more expensive gas supplies. American exporters of gas are gleeful at the prospect of lucrative profits.

European Union leaders like the Russophobic Ursula von der Leyen and Kaja Kallas and the Third Reich collaborating Baltic states are also pleased to end all Russian energy trade with the continent.

The crass audacity of it. So, we have non-EU member Ukraine ordaining itself the prerogative to turn off the heating and lights for Europeans - all in the name of helping the NeoNazi regime fight a NATO proxy war against Russia.

However, some European leaders, to their credit, vehemently oppose what can only be labeled a scam.

FLORENCE - It's a dazzling Tuscan winter morning, and I am inside the legendary Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella, founded in the early 13th century and finally consecrated in 1420, in a very special place in History of Art: right in front of one of the monochrome frescos painted in 1447-1448 by master of perspective Paolo Uccello, depicting the Universal Deluge.

It's as if Paolo Uccello was depicting us - in our current times of trouble. So inspired by neoplatonic superstar Marsilio Ficino - immortalized in a chic red robe by Ghirlandaio at the Cappella Tornabuoni - I tried to pull off a back to the future and ideally imagine who and what Paolo Uccello would feature in his depiction of our current deluge.

Let's start with the positives. 2024 was the Year of the BRICS - with the merit for all the accomplishments going for the tireless work of the Russian presidency.

2024 was also the Year of the Axis of Resistance - until the serial blows suffered during the past few months, a serious challenge which will propel its rejuvenation.

And 2024 was the year that defined the lineaments of the endgame in the proxy war in Ukraine: what remains to be seen is how deep the "rules-based international order" will be buried in the black soil of Novorossiya.

Now let's turn to the auspicious prospects ahead. 2025 will be the year of consolidation of China as the paramount geoeconomics force on the planet.

The US military presence in Syria's oil-rich provinces, as well as crippling economic sanctions imposed over the years, contributed to the downfall of former president Bashar Assad, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has argued.

Armed opposition groups led by Hayat Tahrir-al-Sham (HTS) mounted a surprise offensive in late November, taking over large swaths of Syria and seizing the capital, Damascus, in a matter of days. Government forces offered little to no resistance, and Assad and his family fled to Russia, where they were granted asylum.

In an interview with TASS news agency on Monday, Lavrov said:

"One of the reasons for the situation degrading was the former leadership's inability to satisfy the population's basic needs amid a protracted civil conflict. A large part of the blame for this lies with Washington, which has de facto occupied the most resource-rich north-eastern region of Syria, and is also exerting serious sanctions pressure on Damascus. This economic 'strangulation' by Washington has resulted in discontent among the population."

According to Lavrov, faced with dire economic conditions, Assad's government had to implement unpopular measures, which in turn resulted in protests. And while Moscow had been providing Damascus with humanitarian assistance, the former authorities failed to engage in meaningful dialogue with the opposition and neighboring states.

After the Russian military's Strategic Missile Forces (RVSN) used the latest "Oreshnik" missile in Dnepropetrovsk on November 21, the world was left shocked, with news ranging from "end of the world" scaremongering to ridicule.

Some major German media outlets resorted to the latter, with Julian Roepcke (better known as Jihadi Julian), one of the more prominent "military experts" at the Bild, a German tabloid, saying that the missile "likely carried no explosive charge and did not cause any significant damage".

Roepcke's report, published on November 23, says that the launch was "a propaganda and political action rather than a military one", as there was "neither a nuclear charge nor explosives inside". The German author insists "that's the reason the damage was so insignificant".

The cybersecurity breach was classified as a "major incident," with the intelligence community assessing its impact.

Alleged state-sponsored Chinese hackers have infiltrated the US Treasury Department, gaining access to unclassified documents and certain workstations used by government employees, according to a letter sent by the department to lawmakers on Monday.

The Treasury Department was alerted to the breach on December 8 by BeyondTrust, a third-party software service provider. The hackers obtained a security key used by the vendor to secure a cloud-based service that remotely provides technical support for Treasury Departmental Offices (DO) end users. With this key, the perpetrators were able to override the service's security, remotely access specific workstations, and gain access to unclassified documents maintained on those systems.

The Treasury Department, in a formal letter dated December 30, stated:

"Based on available indicators, the incident has been attributed to a Chinese state-sponsored Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor."

The department classified this breach as a major cybersecurity incident and has collaborated with the FBI, the intelligence community, and other investigators to assess the hack's impact. The compromised service has been taken offline, and there is no evidence that the perpetrators still have access to Treasury information.