The US military has increased the number of troops in Syria from 500 to 2,000, the Pentagon says, adding that the "conditions-based" military presence is justified by the need to "stabilize" liberated areas.

The Pentagon has officially announced that there are now 2,000 troops in Syria - a fourfold increase from the previous figures given. "The United States will continue necessary counterterrorism and stabilization effort," Pentagon spokesman Colonel Robert Manning said.

"The United States will sustain a conditions-based military presence in Syria to combat the threat of insurgent-led insurgency, prevent the resurgence of ISIS and to stabilize liberated areas."

Manning claimed that the Iraqi Army and Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have liberated about 97 percent "of the people and land" previously controlled by Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) in Iraq and Syria respectively. He said the campaign to defeat IS is now in a new phase in these countries.

Russia's federal agency for high-profile crimes has initiated a criminal case against former Ukrainian Defense Minister Anatoly Gritsenko over a call to blow up cars in Russia, which he made on Ukrainian television.

The chief spokesperson for the Russian Investigative Committee, Svetlana Petrenko, told reporters on Thursday that the decision to launch the criminal case against Gritsenko had been made after in early July this year. The ex-minister had alleged that Russian special services were complicit in the killing of a Ukrainian counterintelligence officer and called for extrajudicial reciprocal action.

"If this is a war and not just games for the president every car explosion in Kiev or Mariupol must cause two car explosions in Taganrog or Moscow," Gritsenko said in an interview with 112 Ukraine TV.

Lee speaks with Ray McGovern about the intelligence community's habit of disseminating faulty intelligence for the benefit of the war machine.

McGovern co-founded a group called Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), which fights to bring people the truth, especially when it comes counter to government lies or the media's propaganda machine.

Russia's Defense Ministry is ready to hold talks with the US in helping them fight ISIS in in Iraq's western regions, Russian First Deputy Defense Minister General of the Army Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the General Staff, said at an annual briefing for foreign military attaches on Wednesday.

"The attention of the international counterterrorism coalition should be focused on how to destroy militants in Iraq's western regions in order to prevent the ISIS comeback to Syria and how to exclude the revival of Islamic Caliphate there, but not on deployment of own military bases in Syria," Gerasimov said.

"We are ready to hold dialogue and join American counterparts in solving this issue," he said.

At a Nov. 6 press conference with US President Donald Trump, Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe was asked if Japan would respond to North Korean missile launches by shooting them down.

"I could just take a piece of the Prime Minister's answer," Trump interjected, "He will shoot them out of the sky when he completes the purchase of lots of additional military equipment from the United States. He will easily shoot them out of the sky, just like we shot something out of the sky the other day in Saudi Arabia."

But Trump was wrong: The US can't easily shoot down missiles like the one North Korea tested yesterday, which are designed to launch nuclear weapons. The Saudi military did intercept a missile using a US-made Patriot missile defense system, but it was a medium-range missile moving at far slower speeds than a nuclear warhead launched by an inter-continental ballistic missile.

Stopping a nuclear ICBM is a much more difficult challenge, one that the US has struggled with since the Cold War, spending hundreds of billions of dollars to come up with a system of sensors and missiles called GMD, or Ground-based Midcourse Defense.

The premise is simple: Once the US detects a missile launch with a variety of radar systems, it will shoot its own interceptor into the sky. After the enemy nuclear warhead separates from its rocket booster, a defensive interceptor, or "kill vehicle," separates from its own booster and attempts to crash into the warhead. Executing this maneuver during a roughly twenty minute window against a warhead moving faster than the speed of sound is extremely difficult in practice.

Yesterday, during an interview on Fox News' "Fox and Friends", Congressmen Matt Gaetz declared: "We have got to find out what's going to be done to clean up the deep state that's discrediting the rule of law in this country, giving special treatment to liberal Democrats like Hillary Clinton, and then having just this merciless prosecution of the president."

Today, During a morning press conference organized by Congressmen Matt Gaetz, Gaetz , Jim Jordan , Mark Meadows, and others expressed their frustration in the FBI's investigation into Hillary Clinton's criminal activity.

Mr. Gaetz, who is a member of the House Judiciary Committee, has been fighting for a comprehensive investigation into Mrs. Clinton's emails ever since 2016, found the investigation (or lack thereof) "deeply troubling."

In the context of the New Great Game in Eurasia, the New Silk Roads, known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), integrates all of China's instruments of national power - political, economic, diplomatic, financial, intellectual and cultural - to shape the 21^st century geopolitical/geoeconomic order. BRI is the organizing concept of China's foreign policy for the foreseeable future; the heart of what was conceptualized, even before President Xi Jinping, as China's "peaceful rise."

The Trump administration's reaction to the breath and scope of BRI has been somewhat minimalistic. For the moment, it amounts to a terminological switch from what was previously known as Asia-Pacific to "Indo-Pacific." The Obama administration, up to the former president's last visit to Asia in September 2016, always referred to Asia-Pacific.

Indo-Pacific includes South Asia and the Indian Ocean. So, from an American point of view, that does imply elevating India to the status of a rising global superpower able to "contain" China.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson could not have stated it more bluntly: "The world's center of gravity is shifting to the heart of the Indo-Pacific. The United States and India - with our shared goals of peace, security, freedom of navigation, and a free and open architecture - must serve as the eastern and western beacons of the Indo-Pacific. As the port and starboard lights between which the region can reach its greatest and best potential."

Attempts to portray it as a "holistic approach" may mask a clear geopolitical swerve where Indo-Pacific sounds like a remix of the Obama era "pivot to Asia" extended to India.

Indo-Pacific directly refers to the Indian Ocean stretch of the Maritime Silk Road, which as one of China's top connectivity routes, features prominently in "globalization with Chinese characteristics." As much as Washington, Beijing is all for free markets and open access to commons. But that must not necessarily imply, from a Chinese point of view, a single, vast institutional web overseen by the US.

Boris Johnson has called the war in Iraq a "mistake," but says that Britain still needs to be bold enough to step back into the Middle East in order to avoid further years of instability and terrorism.


Mapping out his post-Brexit foreign policy vision in a speech on Thursday, the foreign secretary warned that the United Kingdom must not be hampered by old wounds left by past conflicts in Libya and the Middle East.

"British foreign policy is not the problem; it is part of the solution," he said, making the point that unrest in Syria and the Middle East "have been exacerbated not so much by Western meddling as by our aloofness."

Newly-appointed Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson is taking the hardline approach on UK-born Islamic State fighters with a very clear, cold-blooded message: Britain will find you, and Britain will kill you.

In an interview with the Daily Mail, Williamson made his stance clear.

"Quite simply, my view is a dead terrorist can't cause any harm to Britain," he said. "I do not believe that any terrorist, whether they come from this country or any other, should ever be allowed back into this country. We should do everything we can do to destroy and eliminate that threat."

Williamson went on to condemn British citizens who had gone overseas to join terrorist organizations, stating that they "hate everything that Britain stands for, hate our values, hate that Britain is as a beacon to the world of democracy and tolerance." He said it was right that Britain's forces were trying to tackle that threat - to stop those people from returning home to launch attacks here.

US President Donald Trump makes one of the most protracted and painful world problems sound like he's selling a condo between two parties. With cheesy easiness, he bluffs everybody gets a "great deal."

"We want an agreement that is a great deal for the Israelis and a great deal for the Palestinians." Thus spoke Trump this week in announcing US recognition of Jerusalem as the capital city of Israel.

The American property tycoon-turned-politician has shown again this week his vast ignorance of international relations. The trouble is that Trump's rank foolishness risks inflaming the already combustible Middle East region and beyond.