There is a need for Moscow and Washington to cooperate, but it's hard for Russia when it understands "it's being cheated," former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev said in an interview with AP, focused on Russia-US relations.

Gorbachev said the West's scapegoating Russia for such a long time couldn't but leave a trace. "They have been badgering Russia with accusations and blaming it for everything. And now there is a backlash to that in Russia." It doesn't mean that Moscow doesn't want the collaboration with Washington, he hastened to add, but there are issues interfering with it - for example, the US itself. "Russia wants to have friendly ties with America, but it's difficult to do that when Russia sees that it's being cheated," Gorbachev told AP.

He added that the tension between modern Russia and the West dates back to the collapse of the USSR. "They were rubbing their hands, saying, 'How nice! We had been trying to do something about the Soviet Union for decades, and it ate itself up!'" Gorbachev said, slamming Western "triumphalism" as a key issue in relations between Russia and the West.

Nevertheless, Russia and the US should develop amicable relations because they are "so important and concern everyone else, so we must take the interests of others into account. The world needs Russia and the United States to cooperate. Together, they could lead the world ... to a new path."

The Washington Post late Friday night published an explosive story that, in many ways, is classic American journalism of the worst sort: The key claims are based exclusively on the unverified assertions of anonymous officials, who in turn are disseminating their own claims about what the CIA purportedly believes, all based on evidence that remains completely secret.

These unnamed sources told the Post that "the CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system." The anonymous officials also claim that "intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails" from both the DNC and John Podesta's email account. Critically, none of the actual evidence for these claims is disclosed; indeed, the CIA's "secret assessment" itself remains concealed.

There are some good reasons to believe Russians had something to do with the breaches into email accounts belonging to members of the Democratic party, which proved varyingly embarrassing or disruptive for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. But "good" doesn't necessarily mean good enough to indict Russia's head of state for sabotaging our democracy.

There is circumstantial evidence that the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the rest of the presstitute media are part of a conspiracy with the oligarchs, the military/security complex, the Hillary Democrats, and neoconized Republicans to shut down the dissident Internet alternative media and to deny Donald Trump the presidency.

Consider the brand new website PropOrNot and its fake news list of 200 Internet Russian agents. PropOrNot is a website hidden behind multiple screens as would be an offshore tax avoidance scheme. In other words, no known, responsible entity is behind the site, which has libeled 200 other websites, or if it is, it is too ashamed of what it is doing to be associated with it publicly.

Consider the expertise and money required to shield the identity of an organization, whether tax avoidance or website. This is not something that just anyone can do. This type of Klingon cloaking requires real money or the CIA.

As long as it pretends to be a newspaper, the Washington Post is subject to journalistic ethics. But the PropOrNot story by Craig Timberg violated journalistic ethics. Unsupported accusations were leveled against 200 websites, a McCarthyism record.

How did a story, which would have been instantly quashed by editors in my day as a Wall Street Journal editor get past Timberg's editor?

That is the question.

Here we have the Post committing libel against 200 websites, all of whom can sue for damages. There go Bezos' billions.

Would a Washington Post editor of any intelligence have published such a libel-inviting story unless the owner, Bezos, gave the OK or the order?

How can the Washington Post feel secure in an act of libel?

Is it because Bezos is protected by his reported membership on a US government committee, along with the Google CEO?

Islamic State fighters who took Palmyra may have seized weapons and air defense equipment that could threaten the US-led coalition, its commanding general said, adding he expected Russia and Syria to deal with the "embarrassing" loss.

Several thousand Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) fighters launched an all-out assault on Palmyra - and the nearby modern city of Tadmur - over the weekend, overwhelming the Syrian garrison by Sunday. Most of the civilian population has been evacuated, according to the governor of Homs Province. However, some of the defenders' military hardware may have fallen into the terrorists' hands.

"We believe it includes some armored vehicles and various guns and other heavy weapons, possibly some air defense equipment," Lieutenant-General Stephen Townsend, commander of Operation Inherent Resolve, told reporters on Wednesday.

Here are two of political history's great constants: first, countries meddling in the internal affairs of others (both enemies and "friends"); and, second, bogus charges from a faction in one country that foreigners are meddling in its internal affairs to help another faction.

Both are poison for any country that wishes to rule itself.

So if we're serious about being a self-governing republic, we have to demand that President Obama declassify as much intelligence as possible that Russia may have intervened in the 2016 presidential election.

US President-elect Donald Trump's decision to nominate ExxonMobil Chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson as secretary of state signals Trump's intention to normalize relations with Russia and boost US cooperation with Arab states, Lebanese experts told Sputnik.

Lebanese geopolitics specialist Riyad Eid stressed that Tillerson's nomination proved Trump's commitment to his election pledges on Russia.

"By appointing Tillerson, Trump confirms his desire to work closely with Russia in terms of foreign policy, in order to reach a mutual understanding on many difficult issues, including Syria and Ukraine, as well as regarding energy industry in Europe," Eid said Wednesday.

He added that Tillerson had great experience in the energy sector and was familiar with trends in the economy, which would also serve US national interests.

President Bashar al-Assad asserted that military operations will not stop after liberating Aleppo city from terrorists, and that pauses only happen in an area in which terrorists say that they are prepared to hand in their weapons or leave the area.

In an interview given to Russia 24 and NTV channels that was broadcast on Wednesday, President al-Assad said that the recent attack by ISIS on Palmyra in large numbers and over a large area means that ISIS received direct support from states, and that the timing of this attack is linked to the battle of Aleppo, because they wanted to undermine the importance of liberating Aleppo and to to distract the Syrian Army and fragment its efforts in different directions, asserting that "as we liberated Palmyra in the past, we will liberate it again."

His Excellency said that the Americans are treacherous, and when their plans fail, they create chaos and then manage the chaos in a manner which enables them to blackmail the different parties, adding that Washington tried to promote the idea that there is something called "moderate opposition" or "moderate fighters," but they failed in doing that because the facts on the ground proved that all those they support are extremists, whether they belong to al-Nusra, ISIS, or other organizations with the same extremist and terrorist ideology.

President al-Assad said that reconstruction is a huge and very useful economy for any country in the post-war stage, and that Syria has very large material capabilities in the private sector, both in Syria or in the countries of expatriation or among businessmen who emigrated during the crisis, stressing that most of those will return to rebuild their country, and consequently economic movement will start, affirming that there isn't a great concern in this regard, adding that the Syrian people will not accept any company coming from any state that took a hostile position towards Syria or towards the integrity of Syrian territory or a state that supported terrorists.

Following is the full text of the interview:

Question 1: Mr. President, thank you very much for availing us of this opportunity in order to know your perspective of what's happening in Syria now, and how the situation would be in the future. I believe that it's very important for our Russian audience to know what's going on outside our country. Let's start with the success you have achieved in Aleppo, which is really an important achievement and gives you significant power. But, what will happen after Aleppo? Are you going to move towards Idleb or al-Raqqa, or are you going to stop a little in order to strengthen your position, or reframe your conditions - based on your current strength - in order to reach an understanding with other powers, like the American alliance?

President Assad: All the things you mentioned go in parallel: we liberate a certain area of the terrorists, and then strengthen our positions in that area, taking precautions against any counterattack by the terrorists from any direction, particularly that they receive support from a number of countries. At the same time, and in parallel with military operations, we provide opportunities on a daily basis both for civilians to leave the terrorist-controlled areas and an exit to terrorists themselves if they want to leave the area with their light weapons or hand themselves over to the state and receive an amnesty in return. As to Aleppo, liberating the city is of course important, but before we talk about the other areas, we need to fortify the city from the outside, in the sense of cleaning the areas surrounding it of terrorists. So far, the areas in which the terrorists are ensconced are about a few square kilometers, but terrorists outside the city are still shelling it with rockets and mortars on a daily basis. Two days ago, a number of people fell martyrs and dozens were wounded in Aleppo. So, liberating Aleppo doesn't end with liberating the city itself, for it needs to be secured on the outside. Afterwards, identifying which city comes next depends on which city contains the largest number of terrorists and which city provides other countries the opportunity to support them logistically. Currently, there are direct links between Aleppo and Idleb because of the presence of Jabhat al-Nusra inside and on the outskirts of Aleppo and in Idleb. But the final answer to this must be after the liberation of the city, first, and through discussions with the Russian leadership which takes part in these battles with us, and also with the Iranian leadership.

Whistleblower William Binney, a former National Security Agency official, is speaking out against the Central Intelligence Agency's claims that Russia hacked the Democratic Party.

Binney, a cryptanalyst-mathematician and a Russia specialist at one point during his 30 years with the NSA, is a signatory of an open letter released Monday from six retired intelligence officials, calling themselves the "Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity," who assert that the allegations that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC) are baseless.

"The evidence that should be there is absent; otherwise, it would surely be brought forward, since this could be done without any danger to sources and methods," the letter stated. "Thus, we conclude that the emails were leaked by an insider - as was the case with Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. Such an insider could be anyone in a government department or agency with access to NSA databases, or perhaps someone within the DNC."

In an in-depth interview on Radio Sputnik's Loud & Clear, Binney details points clarifying that the WikiLeaks email releases are not hacks at all, but actually insider leaks.

Thank you sweet baby Mall Santa for The Intercept. The latest state propaganda pieces being circulated by the Washington Post and the New York Times have been producing a face-shaped indent in my desk where I've been slamming my head with a percussive intensity to which you could record studio-quality Led Zeppelin covers, so it's nice to have the brief respite of some occasional journalistic integrity in my world.

This morning The Intercept's Jeremy Scahill and Jon Schwartz published this glorious article titled "Obama Must Declassify Evidence Of Russian Hacking," arguing that since intelligence agencies have such an extensive record of lying to the American people and getting things so spectacularly bass-ackwards wrong, it is the President's duty to provide the American people with undeniable proof of the alleged Russian conspiracy to get Donald Trump elected.

But they didn't stop there. They then proceeded to provide a link to their secure drop with the invitation for a "patriotic whistleblower" to leak proof of Russian election tampering to them, which they will publish once verified.

The Intercept has an extensive history of not only advocating for whistleblowers, but for working with them. Just reading about Glenn Greenwald's collaboration with Edward Snowden to release the NSA surveillance leaks provides a clear window into how honest, professional and trustworthy these people are, as does the mutual respect Greenwald and Snowden have for each other. A patriotic whistleblower could not possibly ask for a better resource to drop evidence of Russian election tampering, if indeed any such evidence exists.

So there it is. Any of the many, many people involved in the CIA, along with the anonymous source who told the Washington Post about the unproven findings of its "secret assessment", now has the ability to provide hard substantiation for this extremely serious allegation to the American people. If it was so important that they could share the accusations against Russia with the state media pawns in the Washington Post, it should also be important to them to provide evidence of these accusations to the people Donald Trump will ostensibly be presiding over as of January 20th. It's really not too much to ask, and anyone can do it.