The phrase"FAKE NEWS" has exploded in usage since the election, but the term is similar to other malleable political labels such as "terrorism" and "hate speech"; because the phrase lacks any clear definition, it is essentially useless except as an instrument of propaganda and censorship. The most important fact to realize about this new term: those who most loudly denounce Fake News are typically those most aggressively disseminating it.

One of the most egregious examples was the recent Washington Post article hyping a new anonymous group and its disgusting blacklist of supposedly pro-Russia news outlets - a shameful article mindlessly spread by countless journalists who love to decry Fake News, despite the Post article itself being centrally based on Fake News. (The Post this week finally added a lame editor's note acknowledging these critiques; the Post editors absurdly claimed that they did not mean to "vouch for the validity" of the blacklist even though the article's key claims were based on doing exactly that).

President Park Geun-hye is suspected of complicity in her former senior secretary Cho Won-dong's unsuccessful attempt to force CJ Group's vice chairman to quit in 2013, prosecutors said Sunday, announcing their indictment of Cho on charges of attempted coercion.

A special investigation team of the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office indicted Cho, a former senior presidential secretary for economic affairs, without detention for coercing CJ Group Chairman Sohn Kyung-shik to dismiss his niece Lee Mie-kyung from the group's vice chairmanship in July 2013.

Prosecutors have already named Park a suspect in the abuse of power scandal involving her longtime friend Choi Soon-sil and her associates, saying the president colluded in Choi's efforts to force donations from large companies worth tens of millions of dollars. The National Assembly voted to impeach the president on Friday, suspending her from office pending a Constitutional Court decision.

Overnight the media propaganda wars escalated after the late Friday release of an article by the Washington Post (which last week admitted to using unverified, or fake, news in an attempt to smear other so-called "fake news" sites) according to which a secret CIA assessment found that Russia sought to tip last month's U.S. presidential election in Donald Trump's favor, a conclusion presented without any actual evidence, and which drew an extraordinary, and angry rebuke from the president-elect's camp.

"These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction," Trump's transition team said, launching a broadside against the spy agency. "The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It's now time to move on and 'Make America Great Again.' "

The Washington Post report comes after outgoing President Barack Obama ordered a review of all cyberattacks that took place during the 2016 election cycle, amid growing calls from Congress for more information on the extent of Russian interference in the campaign. The newspaper cited officials briefed on the matter as saying that individuals with connections to Moscow provided WikiLeaks with email hacked from the Democratic National Committee, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's campaign chief and others.

Without a shred of evidence provided, and despite Wikileaks' own on the record denial that the source of the emails was Russian, the WaPo attack piece claims the email messages were steadily leaked out via WikiLeaks in the months before the election, damaging Clinton's White House run. Essentially, according to the WaPo, the Russians' aim was to help Donald Trump win and not just undermine the U.S. electoral process, hinting at a counter-Hillary intent on the side of Putin.

Over 4,000 Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) terrorists, reinforced by tanks, have started an offensive to retake the key Syrian city of Palmyra after regrouping themselves, the Russian Center for Reconciliation in Syria says.

According to the Russian military, the terrorists have received considerable reinforcement, including heavy military hardware from the regions of Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor.

"IS has dispatched a considerable force to Palmyra from the area of Raqqa, where militants, backed by the US and the international coalition ceased combat action against the terrorists this week," the statement by the Russian military says.

Tucker Carlson dismantles the liberal left's digital book burning campaign by pointing out that Vox News is also pushing hundreds of "fake news" stories.

In the video below, Carlson actually reads out the ridiculous "fake news" stories that Vox has published, for which the Vox News reporter is left looking as dumb as the censorship agenda he is pushing.

Carlson correctly asks the Vox News reporter...

A Democratic presidential elector in California has joined the effort to block President-elect Donald Trump from actually taking office.

Vinz Koller, chairman of the Monterey County Democratic Party, has joined eight other Democrats and one Republican who want to find a way out of casting their Electoral College votes for Trump, Politico reports.

Koller filed suit December 9 in US District Court of Northern California, challenging the constitutionality of the California statute that requires him and the rest of California's Electoral College members to cast their ballots for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton later this month.

Syrian "moderates" indeed hampered humanitarian efforts in Aleppo, Secretary of State John Kerry admitted, accusing Moscow and Damascus of leaving them little choice. He urged anti-government forces to engage in talks to end the crisis.

"It is true that there have been some occasions where certain elements of the opposition have threatened people who were going to leave [Aleppo], and in some cases prevented humanitarian assistance from being delivered," Kerry said, answering RT's question at a press briefing following a meeting of US, European and Arab foreign ministers in Paris on Saturday.

Having said that such actions by rebel groups are "a very serious offense," the US official however claimed that Washington has "taken steps with respect to anyone we have communication with" to call on them to not engage in "absolutely unacceptable behavior."

The Israeli ruling coalition chairman's controversial statement that it would be "preferable" if Arabs "weren't able to come" to polls since they "make no difference" anyway, was branded as "racist" and "antidemocratic" by opposition politicians and minorities.

The provocative remark was made by the Israeli parliament's coalition chairman, Likud MK David Bitan, while attending a cultural event in Mevasseret Zion, suburb of Jerusalem on Sunday.

"What I'm saying is, if they [Arabs] weren't able to come [to vote], that would be preferable, but it makes no difference; it's not for me to tell them whether to come or not to come [to vote]," the Times of Israel quoted Bitan as saying.

"Ninety-five percent of Arab Israelis vote for the Joint List, which does not represent the Arabs of Israel but rather Palestinian interests," added Bitan, referring to the coalition of four Arab parties, which is the third largest faction in the Knesset.

I venture that few outside the Russian Federation will even know the name of Anatoly Chubais, today the CEO of a Russian high-tech company called Rusnano. Following the high-profile November 15 arrest of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev's Minister of Economics, Alexei Ulyukaev, on charges of accepting at least $2 million in bribes in a state privatization involving Rosneft and Bashneft energy companies, the spotlight has turned to the company of Anatoly Chubais, Boris Yeltsin's 1990s privatization czar, today CEO of state-owned Rusnano,.^[1] If charges are formally brought against Chubais - undeniably one of the most hated of the Yeltsin-era kleptocrat "reformers" who worked with the CIA during the 1990's to plunder Russian state assets worth hundreds of billions for just pennies - it will signal that Putin feels in a strong enough position to purge the pro-free market liberal mafia that still holds a lock grip on the development of the Russian economy.

On 16 November, the day after the dramatic arrest of Ulyukaev, state prosecutors and police raided the offices of Chubias' Rusnano. ^[2] Notable about the reports of the prosecutors' questioning Chubais and other top officers at Rusnano, is the fact that several have fled Russia in recent months to avoid prosecution.^[3] To the present, Chubais remains, and vehemently claims innocence.

In my view, there is vastly more at stake here than the innocence or guilt of Chubais. This move, if combined with the arrest of Ulyukaev, signals a major cleanup of corrupt elements who, beginning even before 1991, organized to sell Russia to the CIA and Western speculators like George Soros. Some history that has generally been blacked out in the West about the true role of Anatoly Chubais and the Yeltsin Presidency are instructive to also understand the irrational rage of Washington and US banks and oligarchs directed at Putin and at everything he does to re-establish Russian sovereignty and stability.

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, according to officials briefed on the matter.


Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton's chances.

"It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia's goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected," said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators. "That's the consensus view."