"They're meddling in our politics!" That's the war cry of outraged Clintonites and neocons, who seem to think election interference is something that Russians do to us and we never, ever do to them.

But meddling in other countries has been a favorite Washington pastime ever since William McKinley vowed to "Christianize" the Philippines in 1899, despite the fact that most Filipinos were already Catholic. Today, an alphabet soup of U.S. agencies engage in political interference virtually around the clock, everyone from USAID to the VOA, RFE/RL to the DHS -- respectively the U.S. Agency for International Development, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Department of Homeland Security. The last maintains some 2,000 U.S. employees in 70 countries to ensure that no one even thinks of doing anything bad to anyone over here.

On Saturday, March 3rd, Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) released an amended version of S.720, the Israel Anti-Boycott Act he had first introduced on March 23rd of last year. The new version of the bill was timed just ahead of the lobbying day of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which held its annual convention in Washington DC over the March 3-4 weekend. AIPAC is asking its supporters to lobby for this amended version of S.720, as well as and S.170, the Combating BDS Act.

In a nutshell, and in non-legalese, S.720 seeks to expand the scope of the 1979 "Export Administration Act," which prohibits boycotts against Israel, Israeli businesses, and Israeli products, initially called for by Arab countries. The Export Administration Act specifies that it is illegal for Americans to heed a call for a boycott of Israel that is issued by a foreign government or governmental entity.

Instigated by AIPAC, Senator Cardin's bill, S.720, would stem the success of BDS, and hinges on the fact that, in March 2016, the United Nations Higher Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) has issued its own call for boycott of Israeli products, including products from the West Bank settlements. The 1979 "Export Administration Act" could not impact individuals engaging in BDS in response to the call from the Boycott National Committee, which is not a governmental entity, but a group of individuals and civilian associations scattered all across the Palestinian Diaspora. However, as S.720 specifically defines the UNHCR as a governmental organization, anyone who boycotts any of the products the UNHCR has listed could now be subject to the penalties delineated in the 1979 Export Administration Act.

The top financial managers at Pentagon this week assured senators that the nearly $1 billion audit now underway at the Defense department will be worth the price.

Defense Undersecretary and Comptroller David Norquist-under questioning by Senate Budget Committee members seeking efficiencies and defense budget reforms-said the price of $367 million in contract audit costs just in fiscal 2018 is about 1/30th of 1 percent of the Pentagon's budget. That is "less than what Fortune 100 companies such as General Electric, Proctor & Gamble and International Business Machines Corp. pay their auditors," he said.

"I anticipate the audit process will uncover many places where our controls or processes are broken," he told the committee. "There will be unpleasant surprises. Some of these problems may also prove frustratingly difficult to fix. But the alternative is to operate in ignorance of the challenge and miss the opportunity to reform."

Norquist delivered a timeline for reporting to Congress the results of outside auditors working at 24 stand-alone Defense components, only nine of which have achieved clean books since 2014, when Congress stepped up pressure for the department to achieve the auditability theoretically required since 1990. The first significant results can be expected this fall, he said, with a final report due in June 2019. "In the second year, we can go deeper," Norquist said

Interest payments on America's war debt could one day exceed the direct costs of combat itself.

If a war costs trillions of dollars, and no one pays for it, what is its true cost? Since the 9/11 attacks, America has poured $3.2 trillion into its wars, according to a new study from Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. The estimate includes what the U.S. government has spent or pledged to spend through 2016 on homeland security, medical and disability care for wounded veterans, and the military and diplomatic campaigns against terrorism in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Syria.

When you factor in the interest America owes on the money it has borrowed to finance these wars, the number rises to almost $3.7 trillion. When you add in likely expenses for 2017 and spending obligations to veterans over the next four decades, the total increases to nearly $4.8 trillion.

It's not just that America's post-9/11 wars include some of the longest wars in U.S. history. Taken together, they're also currently the second-most expensive after World World II, though defense spending as a percentage of the U.S. economy is lower today than it was during many previous conflicts.

Former British spy Christopher Steele was informed months after accepting the job to compile a dossier on then-candidate Donald J. Trump that the Hillary Clinton Campaign and the Democratic National Committee were paying the bills but that's not what the FBI told the secret FISA court when it sought a warrant to spy on one of Trump's campaign volunteers.

This bit of explosive information was revealed in an expose on Steele by The New Yorker's Jane Mayer but the implications for the FBI are profound. Why? Because the bureau explicitly stated in its Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Application to the secret court that Steele was unaware of who backed Fusion GPS, the firm which hired him, for the research.

Steele, however, claimed in the expose titled Christopher Steele, The Man Behind the Trump Dossier that he did know who was paying his bill.

"Under the arrangement, Orbis was a subcontractor working for Fusion GPS, a private research firm in Washington," according to the article. "Fusion, in turn, had been contracted by a law firm, Perkins Coie, which represented both Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Several months after Steele signed the deal, he learned that, through this chain, his research was being jointly subsidized by the Clinton campaign and the D.N.C. In all, Steele was paid a hundred and sixty-eight thousand dollars for his work."

Washington legislators have passed what many are referring to as the most disturbing bill in history that legalizes the commercial sale of human babies to anyone with enough money to buy one.

Washington - When most people think about surrogacy, they imagine a loving infertile or same-sex couple, unable to have children, who need a surrogate mother to give them a baby. Surrogacy has long been an amazing gift for those unable to have babies. However, when laws are passed that commercialize the separation of babies from their birth mother, very real risks to children arise.

When it comes to surrogacy laws in the United States, Washington is proving to be a third world country. Over the years, as countries have legalized "commercial surrogacy," once they realize the horrors that it creates, they proceed to ban it as it creates a market for children to be bought and sold like commodities with no oversight as to where the babies end up.

After watching children being openly sold to human traffickers, in 2015, both Thailand and Nepal banned the act. In 2016, Mexico also banned commercial surrogacy, followed by India last year, and Cambodia this week.

The bans are a result of watching what happens when such laws are in place as it quite literally legalizes the buying and selling of children and creates a market for human trafficking. In spite of these bans, however, the "baby buyers" don't go away, they just move their lobbying to other markets-and their sights have been set on Washington state.

As the Lynden-Tribune reports, last week, the Washington State House of Representatives approved legislation modifying the procedures for determining certain aspects of the legal parent-child relationship, known as the Washington Uniform Parentage Act. The bill makes changes to surrogacy agreements, allowing for "commercial surrogacy," say 10 House Republican women including 42nd District Rep. Luanne Van Werven, R-Lynden.

We have already written more than once on the US president's views on the Korean question: outlining the general approach, summarizing the arguments, emphasizing what a difficult choice he is faced with and looking at how an attempt at dialogue, initiated, it appears, by Joseph Yun, the United States' Special Representative for North Korea Policy, failed because the necessary preconditions were not met.

The difficulty of the choice has resulted in a large number of different opinions. The USA is prepared to talk with the DPRK if the latter completely abandons its nuclear program before the talks begin. In these circumstances, Donald Trump has assured Moon Jae-in that the USA will never start a war with North Korea without South Korea's agreement, even though he has ambiguously hinted at the possibility of doing so if sanctions fail.

The lack of a clear policy is frequently blamed on the fact that there is no experienced North Korea specialist in the Trump Administration. Most academics do not like the new president and do not want to advise him - they would rather just wait and see him get himself in a mess that he can't get out of. Non specialist political experts keep repeating, year after year, that the regime is facing imminent collapse. It is also well known that Donald Trump does not particularly trust the US Intelligence Service and Department of State.

London was not a coincidental choice of Saudi Arabia's new Crown Prince for his first official visit to the Western world. The UK has been deeply involved in the brutal war the Saudis are waging on Yemen.

When it began three years ago this month, the then-foreign minister Philip Hammond explained that Britain's policy was to support the war "in every practical way short of engaging in combat."

He has been true to his word. Since then, not only has Britain licensed over £6 billion ($8.3 billion) worth of military equipment, but has supplied no less than 166 personnel to assist the Saudi arms forces, including several officers deployed in the air-force control room, advising on targeting. Britain provides training to Saudi air-force pilots and battlefield skills to Saudi infantry - including, it was recently revealed, training specifically tailored to Yemeni terrain. On the diplomatic front, the UK has repeatedly used its position on the UN Security Council to block UN investigations into war crimes committed by the Saudi-led coalition, much to the disgust of many of its European partners. In sum, Yemen is being destroyed by British-made missiles, dropped from British planes, by British-trained pilots.

As with the 2016 US presidential election, allegations of Russian interference in the Brexit referendum have been extensively peddled even though there is little evidence to suggest such meddling took place, in either instance.

General secretary of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) Paul Oakley discussed the allegations of anti-EU meddling in the referendum on Britain's membership of the EU with Sputnik reporter Suliman Mulhem.

"Piffle. Every specific allegation which has been made has proved to be groundless or derisory," UKIP's Paul Oakley told Sputnik when asked about the accusations of Russian meddling to persuade Britons to exit the EU.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said there should be an investigation into the massive airstrikes on residential areas in Syria's Raqqa. Putin pointed out that the dead are still unburied and corpses are lying in the ruins.

"As for crimes, go back to Raqqa and at least bury the dead bodies, which are still lying amid the ruins after the air strikes on residential neighborhoods - and investigate these attacks," the Russian leader said as he sat down for an "at times combative" interview with NBC's Megyn Kelly. Putin also raised the point that the battle for Iraq's Mosul involving the US-led forces left the city "razed to the ground."