The Chair of Russia's Foreign Affairs Committee expects that the US will seek to influence the country's presidential election next year, saying Washington will only settle for victory by a pro-Western candidate.

"The United States recognizes elections as fair and democratic only when they are won by pro-western candidates," Senator Konstantin Kosachev wrote on his Facebook page on Friday.

"In the case of any other outcome, election procedures and results are anathema to them," he added.

"Judging by the increasing demagogy about alleged Russian interference [in US polls], they have already started their 'artillery raid' ahead of the Russian presidential elections. It is likely that the scale of pressure there will be unprecedented."

US ploy to use Kurds to increase regional influence and stem rise of Iran disintegrates

On 6th October 2017 - less than two weeks ago - I wrote a lengthy article for The Duran explaining how the US, having failed to achieve regime change in Syria ("Plan A") and having failed to engineer the partition of Syria on sectarian lines ("Plan B"), was now seeking to use the Kurds to destabilise both Iraq and Syria by supporting the setting up of quasi-independent Kurdish statelets in these two countries, in order to stem the rise of Iranian influence there.

In that article I predicted that this Plan C would fail, just as Plans A and B have done, and that its effects would be to alienate Turkey further from the US, bring Iran, Turkey, Syria and Iraq closer together, and would isolate the Kurds in a region where they were already in danger of becoming over-extended.

What I did not imagine when I wrote that article was that it would take all of two weeks for Plan C to start to fail. This was because I seriously overestimated the strength and coherence of the Kurds, especially those of Iraq, whose Peshmerga militia it is now clear was grossly overrated, not just by me but by many other observers of the region.

North Korea's Foreign Affairs Committee has authored an open letter addressed to the government of Australia, in what many are calling an unprecedented direct appeal to a US ally in the wider Pacific regions.

A summary of the letter's contents, as relayed by the Foreign Affairs Committee of the DPRK, is reproduced below:

Power in the Syrian city of Raqqa will be passed to the local population, according to the statement of the US-backed coalition.

Earlier in the day the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), supported by the US-led coalition, announced the complete liberation of the city of Raqqa from Daesh terrorist organization militants.

"The SDF is proud to announce from the center of the city of Raqqa the victory of our forces in the great battle in which IS [Daesh] terrorists lost. Their forces were defeated in the center of the pseudo-caliphate. The city... has been liberated," the Arab-Kurdish detachments said in a press release.

Washington will have to put up with Pyongyang's nuclear status, a top official from North Korea's Foreign Ministry has said, ruling out talks on the matter with the US.

"The Democratic People's Republic of Korea [DPRK] is not planning to hold talks on nuclear weapons and the US has to get along with the DPRK's nuclear status," Choe Son-hui, director-general of the North American Department of North Korea's Foreign Ministry said, speaking at the 2017 Non-proliferation Conference in Moscow.


According to Choe, North Korea's nuclear status is essential for securing "stability and safety" on the Korean peninsula and in north-eastern Asia by extension.

Pyongyang is ready to pacify the Americans and will fight fire with fire if necessary, the official continued.

It's been coming for some time now. The deep state run by the globalists must initiate the final move to take it all over. News US legislators have looped in the major internet players in the media war on Putin and Russia only comes as a surprise for those who are just consumers of Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft products and services. For these people, I've got breaking news. Your glorious internet freedoms are about to be terminated. Be vigilant and watch Microsoft in the next days.

Please allow me to set the stage for what I am about to reveal to you. Back in 2007, just before Microsoft funded the fledgling Facebook startup with $240 million dollars, I was one of the early adopters of the platform owing to my job as a technology analyst. For those of you who did not know Microsoft was largely responsible for Facebook usurping every other social community online, I am sure the fact will have some bearing for you where recent developments are concerned. And for those reading who are surprised I was one of the most read technology analysts in the mid to late 2000s, the fact I tested every major and minor technology hiccup launched from 2005 to 2010 bears mentioning as well. So much for background, I'll leave off laying out my journalism CV in favor of warning you about the coming debauchery.

Let me frame this urgent report in this way.

When VentureBeat and other technology media warned us in 2014 that Facebook was in bed with the NSA and the FBI, this was a litmus test to see if anybody cared enough to pay attention. Some did, but not enough to raise much of a stink. When we were warned that former President Barack Obama was on board with the NSA and US intelligence agencies defying the US Constitution and spying on citizens, this was an even bigger test that "We the People" failed miserably. Further revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden were obscured in the news cycle determined to report his "treason" instead of digging further into what he disclosed. As has been the case with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks these past few years, the deep state owned media and the technocrats have diluted or replaced the truth of their global plan. Fast forward to "fake news", Trump, and the French elections cycle.

Russia is using election interference as a "weapon of choice" to undermine democracy worldwide and must be held accountable for this "warfare," US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said Thursday.

"When a country can come and interfere in another country's elections, that is warfare, it really is," Haley told a panel discussion in New York organized by the George W. Bush institute.


"We didn't just see it here -- you can look at France, you can look at other countries. They are doing this everywhere. This is their weapon of choice," she said.

Vladimir Putin has criticized the US for failing to keep their end of the bargain in a host of international disarmament agreements. He says Moscow will not exit any existing treaties, but promised an "instant, symmetrical response" if Washington decides to quit first.

'US decided to do away with international law'

Speaking during a Q & A session at the Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi, an annual meeting with international journalists and Russia experts, Putin began by recalling the Megatons to Megawatts program, which ran between 1993 and 2013, and saw Russia downblend enriched uranium from the equivalent of about 20,000 of its nuclear warheads into low-enriched uranium to be used as fuel by US power stations.

Putin said that as part of what he called "one of the most effective disarmament efforts in history," US officials made 170 visits to top secret Russian facilities, and "set up permanent workplaces in them adorned with American flags."

"From the Russian side unprecedented openness and trust were demonstrated," said Putin, saying that through the 1990s, about 100 US officials were entitled to carry out surprise inspections of Russian nuclear facilities, as part of Gorbachev and Yeltsin-era agreements.

"What we got in return is well-known - a complete disregard for our national interests, support for separatism in the Caucasus, a circumvention of the UN Security Council, the bombing of Yugoslavia, the invasion of Iraq, and so on. The US must have seen the state of our nuclear weapons and economy and decided to do away with international law."

The United Socialist Party of Venezuela won at least 17 of the 23 governorships, also garnering 54 percent of the vote.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, cast doubt on the results of Venezuela's Regional Elections where candidates from the governing Socialist Party won a vast majority of seats, claiming the vote was not "free and fair."

"An election is only legitimate if it is free and fair, and from the start, this was neither," Haley said via the U.S. mission to the United Nations Twitter account.

The United Socialist Party of Venezuela, or PSUV won at least 17 of the 23 governorships, also garnering 54 percent of the vote. The PSUV candidate for Bolivar state, where no official results have been declared yet, also claimed victory.

Turnout was 61.14 percent in Sunday's polls, with ballots cast at 13,559 polling stations nationwide.

As he prepared to collect a $500,000 payday in Moscow in 2010, Bill Clinton sought clearance from the State Department to meet with a key board director of the Russian nuclear energy firm Rosatom - which at the time needed the Obama administration's approval for a controversial uranium deal, government records show.

Arkady Dvorkovich, a top aide to then-Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and one of the highest-ranking government officials to serve on Rosatom's board of supervisors, was listed on a May 14, 2010, email as one of 15 Russians the former president wanted to meet during a late June 2010 trip, the documents show.

"In the context of a possible trip to Russia at the end of June, WJC is being asked to see the business/government folks below. Would State have concerns about WJC seeing any of these folks," Clinton Foundation foreign policy adviser Amitabh Desai wrote the State Department on May 14, 2010, using the former president's initials and forwarding the list of names to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's team.

The email went to two of Hillary Clinton's most senior advisers, Jake Sullivan and Cheryl Mills.

The approval question, however, sat inside State for nearly two weeks without an answer, prompting Desai to make multiple pleas for a decision.

"Dear Jake, we urgently need feedback on this. Thanks, Ami," the former president's aide wrote in early June.

Sullivan finally responded on June 7, 2010, asking a fellow State official "What's the deal w this?"