NATO's biggest buildup in Europe since the Cold War was met with official cheers in Poland and approving Western media coverage this week, but lack of concern in Western public discourse suggests a collective amnesia towards the continent's horrific past.

Up to 4,000 US troops and hundreds of Abrams tanks and Bradley armored vehicles rolled into Poland after disembarking in Germany last week. Most of the soldiers were from the 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team out of Fort Carson, Colorado. They represent the US army's best assault units.

It is but the latest military escalation since the US launched Operation Atlantic Resolve with NATO partners in April 2014. That operation is said to be a result of the Ukraine conflict, which Washington and allies blame on Russian interference.

Spanish authorities say that among the 10-12,000 weapons seized earlier this week are some capable of bringing down aircraft. The haul comprised illegally reactivated decommissioned weapons, which have been used by terrorists in Europe.

Police arrested four men and woman - all Spanish nationals - who had been operating a sophisticated trafficking network in several provinces across the country under the front of a historical weapons workshop that bought supposedly decorative firearms. The purchased weapons were then restored and sold on the black market throughout Europe.

President-elect Donald Trump tapped Rudy Giuliani as his "go to" guy this week on cybersecurity, but it turns out that Giuliani's New York firm could use a little better security of its own.

The website for the former New York mayor's firm, Giuliani Security, is riddled with vulnerabilities, and numerous tech experts cackled over the irony on social media.

"You wouldn't need to be uber-skilled to hack it," Aaron M. Hill, a web developer at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who was among those bantering about the website's shortcomings on Twitter, said in a telephone interview.

TASS reported that Russia's Defense Ministry is surprised by a lack of assistance to civilians in Aleppo from international organization, though the city has been liberated from militants for a month already, spokesman of the Russian Defense Ministry Major General Igor Konashenkov said on Saturday.

"Surprisingly, after the period of super-close attention to Aleppo from international organizations, involved in humanitarian demining, a month later there are no initiatives to offer assistance to the people in that city," he said. "Is the UN authority on demining and the Geneva international center for humanitarian demining aware of the fact working in Aleppo since mid-December does not risk lives, and all roads to the city are absolutely free and safe? They do know, for sure."

As Trump's inauguration day draws nearer, to say that there has been a complete melt-down among the Washington 'elite' (left and right), the back room boys in the "intelligence" agencies and their paid hacks in the US and wider Western media, would be a massive understatement.

All reason seems to have departed the 'reality creators' in the USA in their drive to shut out facts and ensure their 'exceptional' world-view prevails. But reality and facts are asserting themselves, primarily through the refusal of countries like Russia and China to accept a totalitarian 'pax Americana' that would see every other country bow down to American preeminence

In the face of such insolence, and with no real power to do anything about it, the Washington 'elite' have opted to double down on their propaganda and lies about Russia in particular, blaming that country and its leader, Vladimir Putin, for just about everything that is wrong with the formerly United States of America.

Join us this week on Behind the Headlines as we discuss this bizarre phenomenon and the ways in which the extreme subjectivity of American 'leaders' is now manifesting among the American people.

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Canada's new, right-wing and pro-globalization minister of foreign affairs, Chrystia Freeland, is one of 13 pro-Ukraine coup extremists who are banned by the Russian government from travel to Russia as of March 2014.

The ban measure nearly three years ago was a retaliatory measure against the decision of the Canadian government then led by Stephen Harper to join economic and political sanctions against Russia and Crimea that were levied by the United States and the European Union.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte says he could impose martial law if the drug problem in the country becomes "very virulent," warning that he is prepared to disregard the Supreme Court and Congress.

Speaking to members of the Chamber of Commerce in Davao on Saturday, Duterte said protecting his country supersedes any consideration of legal blocks to imposing martial law.

Kiev officials are scrambling to make amends with the president-elect after quietly working to boost Clinton

Donald Trump wasn't the only presidential candidate whose campaign was boosted by officials of a former Soviet bloc country.

Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton's allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.

A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort's resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump's campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine's foe to the east, Russia. But they were far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia's alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails.

Russia's effort was personally directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, involved the country's military and foreign intelligence services, according to U.S. intelligence officials. They reportedly briefed Trump last week on the possibility that Russian operatives might have compromising information on the president-elect. And at a Senate hearing last week on the hacking, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said "I don't think we've ever encountered a more aggressive or direct campaign to interfere in our election process than we've seen in this case."


There's little evidence of such a top-down effort by Ukraine. Longtime observers suggest that the rampant corruption, factionalism and economic struggles plaguing the country — not to mention its ongoing strife with Russia — would render it unable to pull off an ambitious covert interference campaign in another country's election. And President Petro Poroshenko's administration, along with the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, insists that Ukraine stayed neutral in the race.

Yet Politico's investigation found evidence of Ukrainian government involvement in the race that appears to strain diplomatic protocol dictating that governments refrain from engaging in one another's elections.

The U.S. intelligence community's unprecedented assault on an incoming U.S. president - now including spreading salacious rumors - raises questions about how long Donald Trump can hold the White House, says Daniel Lazare.

Is a military coup in the works? Or are U.S. intelligence agencies laying the political groundwork for forcing Donald Trump from the presidency because they can't abide his rejection of a new cold war with Russia? Not long ago, even asking such questions would have marked one as the sort of paranoid nut who believes that lizard people run the government. But no longer.

Thanks to the now-notorious 35-page dossier concerning Donald Trump's alleged sexual improprieties in a Moscow luxury hotel, it's clear that strange maneuverings are underway in Washington and that no one is quite sure how they will end.

In berating Russia for alleged interference in the recent U.S. election, the U.S. intelligence community ignores the extensive U.S. role in manipulating political movements around the globe, observes Jonathan Marshall.

The Director of National Intelligence's public report on alleged Russian hacking opens with a "key judgment" that "Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow's longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order."

That's a strong claim. The assertion suggests a fundamental and sustained Kremlin challenge to Western freedom, reminiscent of the early years of the Cold War. That such an unqualified and ideologically charged claim should lead the report speaks volumes about the politicization of the U.S. intelligence community's leadership. That such a claim has gone mostly unchallenged, aside from Donald Trump, speaks volumes about the powerful ideological consensus in Washington for escalating political and military conflict with Russia.

Yet a recent review of relations with Russia during the Obama years by former U.S. ambassador Michael McFaul — a harsh critic of President Putin — puts the lie to the notion that Moscow has consistently sought to undermine U.S. political interests. At the same time, however, McFaul's article illustrates the blinders shared by many American policy makers regarding the counterproductive impact on Russian behavior of repeated U.S. electoral and military interventions.