Update: The book may still be available on Amazon but through other vendors. Kindle version remains unavailable.

It is ironic that just today I posted an article about the paramount importance of free speech, which numerous government bureaucracies and large corporations in the West seek to suppress in their purported endeavor to police "hate speech." And just today one of the great media behemoths, Amazon.com suppressed my book (as I expected they might). I assure you there's not even a trace of hate or hate speech in my book.

The Killing of William Browder is a detailed deconstruction of Bill Browder's dangerous deception. It shows beyond a reasonable doubt that Bill Browder's account in his own book (Red Notice) is false. Nevertheless, on the basis of that false narrative, Browder has been able to lobby the U.S. Congress into passing the Magnitsky Act which greatly damaged the bilateral relations between Russia and the United States. Browder himself is on record stating: "I think we are entering into a hot war right now, and that the best possible outcome is a Cold War." This agenda is obviously important enough that you are not allowed to know the truth about it.

My book, published only last month (August 2017), was starting to get some traction and in its first four weeks gained very positive reviews from readers (seven 5-star reviews and one 4-star review). That's when Browder's legal counsel Jonathan M. Winer stepped in. He contacted CreateSpace and demanded that my book be delisted alleging that it contained defamatory content. CreateSpace promptly obliged, suppressing the book and instructing me that I needed to, "work with the disputing party until a resolution is reached." Once I obtained the "disputing party's" agreement, I would need to provide CreateSpace a confirmation from both parties so that they may "take action on the title as appropriate."

King Salman of Saudi Arabia has issued a decree ordering that women be allowed to drive, Saudi state media has reported. Under the conservative kingdom's previous laws, women were banned from driving.

The decree orders the Saudi interior minister to draft and adopt necessary amendments to the traffic regulations and to form a special commission consisting of the ministers of interior, finance, labor and development to "study the necessary arrangements" needed for the implementation of the new rules, as reported by the state SPA news agency.

The new rules are expected to come into force on June 24, 2018, according to the decree.

The Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, and its Syrian spinoff, the YPG, are cult-like radical movements that intertwine Marxism, feminism, Leninism and Kurdish nationalism into a hodge-podge of ideology, drawing members through the extensive use of propaganda that appeals to these modes of thought.

Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the PKK, took inspiration from American anarchist Murray Bookchin in creating his philosophy, which he calls "Democratic Confederalism."

The PKK spin-off group YPG represents most of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Syria.

With Western political support, they have gained popularity and garnered an impressive amount of support from anarchists and military veterans in the West, some of whom have left the comfort of their home countries to fight with the group.

One of their most productive marketing tools has been to use young, attractive female fighters as the face of the guerrillas. During their fight against Daesh, the PKK has saturated the media with images of these young female "freedom fighters," using them as a marketing tool to take their cause from obscurity to fame. Some of these female fighters in the YPJ are fighting alongside their male counterparts under the direction of the U.S. in the SDF.

Stephen Gowans writes more about this topic in his superb article titled: The Myth of the Kurdish YPG's Moral Excellence.

Much is being made about the ostensibly omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent Russian propaganda machine. In the Western view, it decides Western elections and threatens the 'global liberal order'. In fact, an anti-Putin media organ has published a comparison of the resources devoted to propaganda or 'strategic communications (stratcomm) by Russian and just the US (excluding European) governments. It demonstrates that the American propaganda machine alone is approximately 3-4 times more robust than Moscow's.

Moreover, the US stratcomm machine is growing in leaps and bounds ever since the Ukraine crisis provoked by endless NATO expansion. Just one example, is a NATO-tied American think tank, the Central European Policy Center, funded by US tax payer dollars, is like many other such institutes springing up in the US and Europe specializing in strategic communications to advance the mission of NATO expansion. For the last quarter of a century that expansion eastward to Russia's borders has undermined Western-Russian relations and Russia's early post-Cold War Western trajectory, alienated Russia from democracy and the free market, and ushered in the poorly labeled 'New Cold War.' CEPA's stratcomm is representative of a general deficient US stratcomm deployed by a series of old and new 'research institutes' and media spread across the frontier between Russia and Eastern/Central Europe.

A recent CEPA stratcomm piece demonstrates the irony that while Washington and Brusslels decry Moscow's propaganda on RT, by trolls, and other media, they lag behind in such activity only by the quality of their own strategic communications. Titled "Liar's Paradox: The Kremlin's Master Narrative," CEPA condemns false Russian stratcomm by issuing its own.

The top U.S. military commander has warned against pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal, saying doing so would complicate U.S. efforts to reach agreements with other nations.

General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made the comments September 26 in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

His remarks come as U.S. President Donald Trump continues to criticize Tehran, and the landmark 2015 nuclear deal negotiated by his predecessor, Barack Obama in conjunction with other world powers.

The agreement curtailed Tehran's nuclear ambitions in exchange for lifting punishing Western sanctions. Trump has called the deal "an embarrassment."

Dunford told senators that Iran was complying with the deal.

Cold War then. Cold War now

The anti-Russian/anti-Soviet bias in the American media appears to have no limit. You would think that they would have enough self-awareness and enough journalistic integrity -- just enough -- to be concerned about their image. But it keeps on coming, piled higher and deeper.

One of the latest cases in point is a review of a new biography of Mikhail Gorbachev in the New York Times Book Review (September 10). The review says that Gorbachev "was no hero to his own people" because he was "the destroyer of their empire". This is how the New York Times avoids having to say anything positive about life in the Soviet Union or about socialism. They would have readers believe that it was the loss of the likes of Czechoslovakia or Hungary et al that upset the Russian people, not the loss, under Gorbachev's perestroika, of a decent standard of living for all, a loss affecting people's rent, employment, vacations, medical care, education, and many other aspects of the Soviet welfare state.

Accompanying this review is a quote from a 1996 Times review of Gorbachev's own memoir, which said:

"It mystifies Westerners that Mikhail Gorbachev is loathed and ridiculed in his own country. This is the man who pulled the world several steps back from the nuclear brink and lifted a crushing fear from his countrymen, who ended bloody foreign adventures [and] liberated Eastern Europe. ... Yet his repudiation at home could hardly be more complete. His political comeback attempt in June attracted less than 1 percent of the vote."

Media Matters, the Democratic media watchdog group, is claiming that the Drudge Report, the conservative news aggregator, is a "pipeline for Russian propaganda."

Since 2012, The Drudge Report, operated by Matt Drudge, has linked to alleged "Russian propaganda websites" nearly 400 times, Media Matters claims.

The group, founded by former conservative journalist-turned-Clinton-lapdog David Brock, wrote a computer program to trawl links that Drudge has posted over the years to websites like RT.com, Sputnik, and TASS, all of which are believed to be controlled by the Russian government.

The U.S. military, in coordination with the Libyan government, has launched airstrikes inside the North African nation for the first time under the administration of President Donald Trump, officials said.

United States Africa Command said in a statement that six "precision strikes" were conducted on Friday against multiple terrorist targets on a desert camp 150 miles southeast of Sirte, a former IS stronghold.

Seventeen Islamic State militants were killed in the attack, military officials said.

Officials said the camp was used to move suspected Islamic State fighters in and out of the country, stockpile weapons and equipment, and plan attacks. Three vehicles were also destroyed in the bombing.

The strikes were the first inside Libya under the Trump administration. The most recent attack before Friday occurred Jan. 19, one day before Trump took office. That attack also struck IS camps near Sirte.

"The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime."
- Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary, August 3, 1914

US President Donald Trump's speech to the United Nations General Assembly on September 19 may well come to be viewed as "historic," but not in a good way. This article will leave for others the impact of Donald Trump's and Kim Jong Un's reality TV show rhetoric. But the substance of Trump's speech-including threats to both North Korea and the Iran deal-may have closed any remaining doors to a diplomatic resolution to this crisis surrounding North Korea's nuclear and missile programs. Moreover, Trump's speech and the North Korean reaction seem to have set us on a path that could very well end in a major war in Asia. The escalating threats and the closing off of diplomatic options by both sides makes it now more likely than ever that President Trump will have to make good on his threat to "utterly destroy" a nation of 25 million people. The strategic consequences of carrying out this threat, even if successful, will be felt for the remainder of this century, largely to the detriment of the United States and the Western World.

Echoes of the Past

Major wars are not created with a single action. They flow from a series of decisions that drive participants towards a sense that no other action but war can extricate them from their predicament. For example, many historians now credit Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany's July 2, 1914 telegram to the Austrian government, which gave his ally a so-called blank check to do whatever it wished in the crisis with Serbia, as the fatal step that set the machinery inexorably in motion for the catastrophe of World War I. Trump shares one common and dangerous trait with the Kaiser: both were amateur militarists given to public bluster and adopting an ultra-nationalist bully-boy style of diplomacy, in part to cover up vast weaknesses in their own characters and their lack of understanding of their countries' true strengths. But neither of these individuals intended to unleash catastrophe. Certainly, the Kaiser would never have sent his blank check if he had known it would result in the fall of his own dynasty, the disappearance of centuries-old empires, the death of millions, and the emergence of Nazism in his country. No doubt, Trump sees himself as a heroic figure standing up to a mad tyrant using rhetoric, economic pressure and, if necessary, military force to break him. He does not see because he does not understand the vast risks he is running for his own citizens, or millions of residents of East Asia.

This week's headlines have been dominated by reaction to US President Donald Trump's bluster against North Korea during his address to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday. This has overshadowed the equally threatening and ominous references he made in the same speech to Iran.

Anyone listening will have been left with two impressions: Trump's speech faithfully echoed the utterances Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, and it brazenly beat the drums of war against Iran.

Trump described Iran as a 'rogue state' and 'corrupt dictatorship' that exports violence, anarchy, and bloodshed. He also said that he had reached a decision regarding the P5+1 nuclear agreement with Iran, while declining to reveal what it is. This has led many observers to conclude that he will soon withdraw from the agreement, in line with his electoral promise to tear it up on the grounds that it is the worst agreement in US history, and in deference to the dictates of the Israel lobby.