The U.S. has killed 50,000 out of 20-30,000 ISIS fighters.

US official: 50,000 Islamic State killed in wars to date, AP, Dec 9 2016

WASHINGTON — A senior US military official for the first time says the US-led coalition has killed 50,000 Islamic State militants in the last two years in Iraq and Syria.

The official said it was a conservative estimate, but it's a bit more than what others have stated before.

CIA: ISIS has 20,000 to 31,500 fighters, The Hills, Sep 11 2014

The CIA estimates the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is made up of anywhere between 20,000-31,500 fighters, according to reports Thursday night.

The agency previously put the number at 10,000 but revised it upward after stronger recruitment since June, according to CIA spokesman Ryan Trapani, who was quoted in The Associated Press.

While ISIS forces come to existence seemingly out of nowhere only to get killed by the U.S. military, civilians in east-Aleppo vanish into the nowhere whenever the Syrian government forces take new areas.

UN diplomat offers to personally escort 900 al-Qaeda fighters out of Aleppo in hope of ending bombing, Telegraph, Oct 6 2016

Speaking in Geneva [UN envoy Staffan de Mistura] said that around 900 members of al-Nusra were still in Aleppo and he asked the jihadists to "look at my eyes" and decide if they were prepared to stay in the city even if it meant more casualties among the 275,000 civilians in the area.

"A thousand of you are deciding on the destiny of 275,000 civilians," he said. "If you did decide to leave [Aleppo] with dignity and with your weapons, to Idlib or anywhere you wanted to go, I personally am ready physically to accompany you."

Russia conducted a test of a revolutionary nuclear-capable drone submarine that poses a major strategic threat to U.S. ports and harbors.

U.S. intelligence agencies detected the test of the unmanned underwater vehicle, code-named Kanyon by the Pentagon, during its launch from a Sarov-class submarine on Nov. 27, said Pentagon officials familiar with reports of the test.

No details were available about the location or results of the test.

Pentagon spokesman Capt. Jeff Davis declined to comment. "We closely monitor Russian underwater military developments, but we will not comment specifically about them," Davis said.

Development of the new drone submarine was first disclosed by the Washington Free Beacon in September 2015 and then confirmed by the Russian military two months later. Russian officials said the secret program was mistakenly disclosed.

Russia calls the drone development program the "Ocean Multipurpose System 'Status-6.'" The developer is Russia's TsKB MT Rubin design bureau, the defense industry entity that builds all Russia's submarines.

On December 7th, was posed the biggest test so far of the mettle of America's President-Elect, Donald Trump.

He had said several times during his campaign, that if elected as President, he would seek a new, less-hostile, relationship between the U.S. and Russia. Now the moment has come when he must either make his first move forward with that historic commitment, or else — by his own inaction when the circumstances (such as right now) demand immediate action on this very promise — set his future U.S. Presidential Administration onto exactly the opposite path: following through with and accepting the existing hostilities, even when they are the most blatantly irrational and counter-factual on their American basis (as now is the case).

The precipitating event here is this: NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg and German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said on December 7th that they want to continue the existing hostilities against Russia: specifically the economic sanctions that U.S. President Barack Obama initiated against Russia after Russia had accepted the overwhelming (90%+) request of the residents in Crimea to restore Crimea's pre-1954 status, of being for hundreds of years an integral part of Russia.

Britain's clownish foreign minister Boris Johnson spilled the beans on Saudi Arabia - and then got a quick pie in the face over his latest antics.

The gaffe-prone senior diplomat was caught on video making disparaging comments about Britain's longtime ally Saudi Arabia. Buffoonish Boris reportedly accused the oil-rich kingdom of fueling "proxy wars" in the Middle East and labeling its House of Saud rulers as "puppeteers" of extremism.

Within hours of Johnson's remarks making the news, the British Prime Minister Theresa May issued a swift rebuke, saying that her top diplomat's comments about Saudi Arabia were not the "official government viewpoint".

A sociologist credited with predicting the fall of the Soviet Union has warned that US global power is in a phase of accelerated decline under the leadership of Donald Trump — and will collapse while the property mogul is in the White House.

Norwegian professor Johan Galtung is known as the "founding father" of peace studies as a scientific subject and is recognized for correctly predicting numerous historical events, among them the Tiananmen Square uprising in China and the September 11 attacks.

He attracted controversy in 2000 when he predicted US global power would collapse by 2025.

But under the Bush administration he revised his forecast for the collapse to 2020. Now, he says that reality that is materializing following the election of the bombastic billionaire.

Mr Trump's election on an anti-immigrant platform coincides with one of the final phases of the decline predicted in the social scientist's 2009 book The Fall of the American Empire—and then What? where he forecast the rise of facism before the country's power receded.

Very interesting news today: according to the journal Izvestia, Russia will be sending operators from the so-called "Chechen" special forces battalions "West" and "East" to Syria to "guard the Russian installations" in Khmeimim and Tartus. According to Russian sources, these two battalions have been converted into a "military police" force which will be fully deployed by the end of December.

This news leaves many fascinating questions unanswered.

First, even though the Russian sources make it sound like we are talking about two full battalions, I suspect that this is not the case and that a few companies will be formed from elements drawn from these battalions. Why? Because these battalions are part of the backbone of the Russian security system in the Caucasus and to use such elite forces just to guard two military installations makes no sense.

Second, this does beg the question of what these "Chechens" (actually a misnomer - see below) will really be doing in Syria. The only circumstance in which it would make sense to send them to protect the Russian bases in Khmeimim and Tartus would be if a massive attack was expected against these installations and no other reinforcements were available, which is clearly not the case.

Third, these two battalions are mostly, but not exclusively, composed of Sunni Muslim operators. That yields obvious advantages. Furthermore, these battalions have had a history of successfully defeating the Wahabi insurgency in Chechnia. This might be crucially important because Wahabi Chechens also compose some of the best forces available to the Daesh/ISIS/US command in Syria.

So what is really happening here?

President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko is on the verge of completely losing his power. A scandal over compromising documents released by the fugitive Ukrainian oligarch Alexander Onishchenko could lead to political collapse in Kiev.

Bloody Business

The documents released by Onishchenko expose the personal financial interests of Petro Poroshenko in conducting the Ukrainian armed forces' punitive operations in Donbass. Companies owned by the president of Ukraine received military contracts. In other words, Kiev spent money from the IMF on the war against its own people. In the end, this money found itself in the accounts of companies belonging to the country's president.

Russian telecom giant Rostelecom has thwarted DDoS-attacks on the five largest banks and financial institutions in the country, the company said in a statement.

All the attacks were recorded on December 5, 2016, the longest of them lasting for over two hours, Rostelecom said on Friday.

"The analysis of the attack sources carried out by Rostelecom specialists revealed that the traffic was generated from the home routers of users who are usually referred to IoT devices," Muslim Medzhlumov, director of the Cybersecurity Center for Rostelecom, said in a statement, published on the company's website.

"A distinctive feature of the attacks was that they were organized with the help of devices that support the CWMP Management Protocol (TR-069). A few weeks ago, a serious vulnerability was revealed in the implementation of this protocol on a number of devices from different manufacturers, which allows attackers [to] organize DDoS-attacks. At the beginning of last week, the largest German operator Deutsche Telecom was subjected to an attack on users' home devices, as well as the Irish provider Eircom," he explained.

The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) reported on December 2 that it had received intelligence of foreign intelligence services preparing large-scale cyber-attacks in Russia in the period starting from December 5, 2016, aimed at destabilizing Russia's financial system and the activities of a number of major Russian banks.

A fullscale invasion is off the table with Trump but Weiss hopes he can at least chop off a piece of it

The nasty, embarrassing neocon hack, Michael Weiss has spent years calling for people other than himself to wage a fullscale war on Syria. Election of Donald Trump, however, has put a dampener on his hopes to the point he has now been reduced to calling for a mere permanent occupation of a part of Syria (for now):

There exists, however, a narrow window of opportunity for an incoming U.S. administration to achieve minimally defined objectives: defeating the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS, guaranteeing that it cannot come back, and making sure that its main rival, al Qaeda, cannot exploit the power vacuum that will come with the collapse of the caliphate.

Based on months of interviews with Syrian opposition figures, ISIS defectors, Sunni Arab tribesmen, U.S. military sources, and intelligence officials, we believe it necessary, as part of this plan, to keep small but effective U.S. garrisons indefinitely in eastern and northeastern Syria and western Iraq.

Holy cow! Illegal US bases on the territory of a nation the US and its allies have funded a jihadi insurgency against -- how is this anything but a recipe for future war?

Not to worry, Weiss tells us, this actually isn't particularly radical:

Employees working for the National Security Agency are leaving their posts in "increasingly large numbers" following the scandal caused by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA's former director has revealed.

Keith Alexander, who ran the NSA from 2005 to 2014, said during a talk hosted by the University of Maryland's journalism school on Tuesday that the mass exodus is partly the result of "how the American people see them." He said much of that is due to Snowden's leaks, and how they were reported.