Donald Trump has a new best friend.

"President-elect Trump, thank you for your warm friendship and your clear-cut support of Israel," gushed Bibi Netanyahu, after he berated John Kerry in a fashion that would once have resulted in a rupture of diplomatic relations.

Netanyahu accused Kerry of "colluding" in and "orchestrating" an anti-Israel, stab-in-the-back resolution in the Security Council, then lying about it. He offered to provide evidence of Kerry's complicity and mendacity to President Trump.

Bibi then called in the U.S. ambassador and read him the riot act for 40 minutes. Israel's ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer charged that not only did the U.S. not "stand up to and oppose the gang-up" at the U.N., "the United States was actually behind that gang-up."

When Ben Rhodes of the National Security Council called the charges false, Dermer dismissed President Obama's man as a "master of fiction."

The U.S. government's plan to conquer Russia is based upon a belief in, and the fundamental plan to establish, "Nuclear Primacy" against Russia — an American ability to win a nuclear war against, and so conquer, Russia.

This concept became respectable in U.S. academic and governmental policymaking circles when virtually simultaneously in 2006 a short-form and a long-form version of an article endorsing the concept, which the article's two co-authors there named "nuclear primacy," were published respectively in the world's two most influential journals of international affairs, Foreign Affairs from the Council on Foreign Relations, and International Security from Harvard. (CFR got the more popular short version, titled "The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy", and Harvard got the more scholarly long version, which was titled "The End of MAD?".)

From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of - EPA? If sending Marines, Navy Seals, and Delta force to the world's trouble spots doesn't work, we could also send the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), or the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS). Both agencies have military equipment, weapons, SWAT teams, drones, and highly trained "Special Agents;" so do many others not traditionally considered law enforcement agencies.

A new report from transparency watchdog group Open the Books documents an explosion in the number of federal agencies with gun-toting, badge-wielding law enforcement divisions. The report, called "The Militarization of America" details the astonishing scope of federal police power. There are now over 200,000 federal officers with arrest and firearm authority, in a whopping 67 different federal agencies.

That is remarkable when you consider there are only 182,000 U.S. Marines. Those 67 federal agencies - 53 of which are not law enforcement agencies - spent a total of $1.48 billion on guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment between 2006 and 2014.

We all understand that the EPA is tasked with enforcing environmental laws. But does it really need a full-blown military-style police force? Congress granted the EPA police powers in 1988, but not with SWAT teams in mind. Even now, the agency says its Criminal Enforcement Program "enforces the nation's laws by investigating cases, collecting evidence, conducting forensic analyses, and providing legal guidance to assist in the prosecution of criminal conduct that threatens people's health and the environment." Well yes, but also by midnight raids with Swat teams and attack dogs, confiscating private property, hauling people off to jail for accidentally spilling a barrel of oil, and other "enforcement" horrors.

During the period covered by the Open the Books report, EPA spent over $3 million on military equipment, including guns and ammo, tanks, drones, helicopters, camouflage, night-vision goggles, and other military hardware. And cops - EPA spent $715 million altogether on its Criminal Enforcement Program. APHIS spent even more - $4.77 million on guns, ammo, and military equipment, as well as the salaries and expenses of 140 cops. At EPA, there are almost 200 of these "Special Agents," and the agency estimates that each one costs taxpayers $216,000 per year in salary, travel, equipment, training and other expenses.

Last week, the world stood fixated at a largely symbolic gesture by the United Nations in which it found the continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank of Palestine to be illegal. Or did it?

Although the UN Security Council, with rare uniformity, chastised Israel for flouting the law of occupation, the resolution, crafted with ambiguous lawyerly precision, left experienced thinkers on the subject debating just what it means.

In its most ambitious read, some would argue it appears that the decree concerned the occupation as a whole, and swept within its prohibitive reach all settlement activity since 1967 when Israel seized the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, from Arab-Palestinian control.

Yemeni sources say a Turkish plane transporting scores of Daesh Takfiri terrorists has landed in the Aden International Airport in southern Yemen.

Yemen's al-Masirah news website reported that the plane carried 150 terrorists who were evacuated from Syria's northwestern city of Aleppo after Syrian government forces fully retook control of the city.

On December 22, the Syrian army said Aleppo had completely returned to government control after the last batch of civilians and militants were evacuated.

Yemeni security sources said the terrorists landed in the airport that is under the supervision of Emirati forces, who are taking part in the Saudi military campaign against Yemen, the report added.

The Turkish plane, al-Masirah said, will take to Turkey 158 Saudi-backed mercenaries, who were injured in recent fighting with the Yemeni army and popular committees in Yemen's province of Ta'izz. The injured are to receive treatment in Turkish hospitals.

The Iraqi capital of Baghdad was rocked by two explosions on Saturday. At least 21 people were killed, more than 40 injured, local media reported, citing the police and medical services.

According to the Kurdistan24 broadcaster, both explosions occurred in the shopping area of the central Sanak district. The second bomb went off when people started gathering to rescue the wounded in the first explosion.


​It remains unknown whether it was a suicide bomber attack or result of the remotely detonated explosive.

One of the explosions was performed by a suicide bomber, while the second blast was caused by the put explosives, a representative of the Ministry of Internal Affairs told the media.

On December 28, Iran said that its air defenses had warned off several US fighter planes and drones during an ongoing military drill. In an interview with Sputnik Persian, prominent Iranian political analyst Sabbah Zanganeh described the US behavior as a provocation.

"In the past three days of military drills, air defense has given warnings to 12 aircraft of trans-regional countries to stay away from the country's airspace," General Abbas Farajpour told the semi-official Tasnim news agency.

The agency said the aircraft included US fighter jets and UAVs.

"What are the Americans doing in this region? Why are they stoking up tensions and conflicts here by meddling in the internal affairs of the countries located in this sensitive part of the world? I wonder what they are doing near the Iranian border," Sabbah Zanganeh told Sputnik Persian.

Documents made public by the Washington watchdog group Judicial Watch and separately by Wikileaks Julian Assange back up Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan's assertion on Tuesday that U.S.-led coalition forces have given support to terror groups, including ISIS in Syria.

In an interview with Democracy Now's Juan González on July 25, Assange said the thousands of documents released by Wikileaks through its "Hillary Clinton Email Archive" contain some 1,700 emails that connect Clinton to al-Qaida and ISIS in both Libya and Syria, demonstrating Clinton supplied weapons to ISIS via Syria.

"So, those Hillary Clinton emails, they connect together with the cables that we have published of Hillary Clinton, creating a rich picture of how Hillary Clinton performs in office, but, more broadly, how the U.S. Department of State operates," Assange said in the interview.

"So, for example, the disastrous, absolutely disastrous intervention in Libya, the destruction of the Gadhafi government, which led to the occupation of ISIS of large segments of that country, weapons flows going over to Syria, being pushed by Hillary Clinton, into jihadists within Syria, including ISIS, that's there in those emails."

The Obama administration's betrayal is exposed in "See Something, Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government's Submission to Jihad," by former DHS officer Philip Haney and WND Editor Art Moore!

Erdogan said that rather than supporting Turkey, the West was backing ISIS and groups Turkey classifies as terrorist organizations, the Kurdish Peoples' Protection Units and Democratic Union Party, who work with the U.S. on the ground in Syria.

"They are supporting all the terror groups," Erdogan said."It's quite clear, perfectly obvious," he said, offering to provide proof in pictures and video.

Seismic is the only word to describe 2016, especially when describing the US-Russia relationship.

Paraphrasing Gramsci, it was a year in which we witnessed the dying of the old world and the birth of the new. By no means, however, has the birth been painless. And nor is it complete.

Western hegemony - geopolitical, military, cultural, and economic - has never been so fiercely contested as it was in 2016. Surveying a year in which anti-Russian hysteria became the new normal in Washington, London, and Paris, not to mention across Eastern Europe on the part of governments for whom Russophobia was deployed as a convenient scapegoat to deflect from their own political and economic shortcomings, we are reminded no empire ever forgives its defeats.

The new American sanctions against Russia are a comedy show and a slap in the face, as there is no real evidence to Russia's alleged interference in the 2016 election, say experts.

The outgoing Obama administration has announced new anti-Russia sanctions that include the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats from the US. The move comes "in response to the Russian government's aggressive harassment of US officials and cyber operations aimed at the US election," Obama said in a statement on Thursday.

Moscow called the decision yet another manifestation of the unpredictable and aggressive foreign policy by the Obama administration.

"We consider this decision and these sanctioqns unjustified and illegal under international law," said Kremlin press spokesman Dmitry Peskov, adding that Russia will respond with countermeasures against the US.