The Syrian army's Air Force destroyed three Daesh command centers in Raqqa, Deir ez-Zor and Homs provinces, local media said Sunday.

According to SANA news agency, Air Force bombed one command post near the al-Tabqa airbase in Raqqa, and the second IS position near the Deir Ezzor military airport.

In the province of Homs, near the villages of Mseieed, al-Msheifeh and al-Sukhneh, Syrian Air Force destroyed convoys of vehicles with military equipment.

Daesh is a designated terrorist organization that is outlawed in Russia and numerous other countries.

The Iraqi army has liberated several locations to the southeast of Mosul from the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group, local media said Sunday

Iraq's army and militias continued to advance on the Daesh-held city of Mosul, capturing three villages and killing 29 terrorists during the operation, the Al Sumaria television channel reported, citing an army officer.

Iraqi forces are carrying out operations in the Nineveh governorate in preparation for an assault on Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city that has been under Daesh control since 2014.

On June 26, the Iraqi army announced the liberation of Fallujah from Daesh, while Prime Minister Haider Abadi vowed to raise the country's flag in Mosul.

For three days this month, June 16-18, I had the opportunity to participate as a panelist in the annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in Russia. I've been in Russia many times since the Ukraine US-backed coup d'état of February 2014, and the deliberate escalations of NATO military and economic tensions and sanctions against the Russian Federation. This year's forum, my second as participant, gave me a rare opportunity to speak with leading representatives from every sector of the Russian economy- from CEOs of the energy sector to the Russian Railways to the national Russia Grid electricity provider to numerous small and mid-sized businessmen, to a wide range of economists. It sharpened my perception of just how precarious the situation of Russia today is.

What became clearer to me in the course of the three days of discussions in St Petersburg is precisely how vulnerable Russia is. Her Achilles Heel is the reigning ideology that controls every key economic post of the Government of the Russian Federation under Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. Under the terms of the Russian Constitution adopted in the chaos of the Yeltsin years and enormously influenced, if not literally drafted, by Russia's foreign IMF advisers, economic policy is the portfolio responsibility of the Prime Minister and his various ministers of Economics, Finance and so forth. The Russian President, today Vladimir Putin, is responsible for defense and foreign policy.

Making the job virtually impossible of reviving credit flows to fuel genuine real investment in urgently needed infrastructure across the vast land expanse of Russia is the Central Bank of Russia. The Central Bank of Russia was given two constitutionally-mandated tasks when it was created as an entity independent from the Russian Government in the first months of the Russian Federation following the breakup of the Soviet Union. It must control Russian domestic inflation and it must stabilize the Ruble against major foreign currencies. Like western central banks, its role is almost purely monetary, not economic.

As it has been repeatedly noted by American analysts, US politicians and journalists are working hand in hand to conceal their crimes and "horrors" from their fellow citizens. Therefore it's not an easy job to find any confirmation regarding such "horrors" imposed by Washington across the globe "in the name of the greater good for Americans." US political elites have learned from the experience of broadcasting the events of the Vietnam War that they must disguise all unpleasant facts from the eyes of the American public.

Since that moment on, the broadcast of "horrors" is strictly prohibited in the United States, therefore the media has no chance of making public the true nature of the bloody massacres committed by American during various wars. Even the images of the bodies of fallen American soldiers being brought back home from wars abroad are strictly prohibited in public media space.

However, the fact that the White House and the CIA are the main instigators of these "horrors" and wars around the globe has been covered in thousands of articles in various countries and media sources. Moreover, the international community has urged numerous non-governmental organizations to start an international investigation into the actions of Washington and the CIA along with the schemes that allow corrupt politicians to gain profits from numerous "training programs of the opposition forces' at the expense of American taxpayers.

At the same time, those American political elites who have already become corrupted are convinced that there will be no prosecution of their deeds, therefore they assume that they can safely carry on targeting other countries for the sake of gaining even more wealth, thereby creating an atmosphere of instability in the world.

This fact has been confirmed yet again by The New York Times, which reported that the weapons supplied by the US and Saudi Arabia to Jordan, where militants of the so-called "Syrian opposition" are being trained, were systematically stolen and sold on the black market. The exact number of stolen weapons hasn't been mentioned, but the newspaper describes it as a stream, which suggests that the number is considerable.

It's like it's a holiday of some sort.

The main suspect in organizing the Ataturk Airport attack is a Chechen militant by the name of Akhmed Chataev whose biography will simply knock your socks off.

The fact that some particularly stubborn types hurried to find a "Russian trail" happened largely because they did not bother to acquaint themselves with Chataev's life story.

In 2009, Hillary Clinton, then U.S. Secretary of State, presented her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, with a "reset" button she thought symbolized a new era for Russian and American diplomacy.

Lavrov pointed out the word the Americans had chosen, "peregruzka," meant "overcharged," not "reset." Though the two leaders laughed off the mistake, the mistranslated button was a symbol of persistent misunderstanding between the two nations.

Russia has long been characterized by many in the West as enigmatic; indeed, almost beyond understanding. It was Winston Churchill who in October of 1939, mere weeks after the invasion of Poland by Nazi armed forces, speculated on the role of Russia in the war, famously depicting Russia as "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."

He added: "...but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest. It cannot be in accordance with the interest of the safety of Russia that Germany should plant itself upon the shores of the Black Sea, or that it should overrun the Balkan States and subjugate the Slavonic peoples of south eastern Europe. That would be contrary to the historic life-interests of Russia."

As we noted today, the rumors of an Italian bank bailout, which started on Monday morning, and were promptly shot down by Merkel the next day, got louder after a Reuters report that the Italian government is considering more creative ways to inject liquidity into Italy's banks. However that was just an appetizer to a main course, which came later today when as the WSJ reported citing a spokeswoman for the European Union's executive arm that the "European Commission has authorized Italy to use government guarantees to create a precautionary liquidity support program for their banks."

How did this happen so quietly under the table and without Merkel's blessing? WSJ says that the program was approved under the bloc's "extraordinary crisis rules for state aid."

And here we thought that Italy's banks are actually doing so very well. Oh wait, no we didn't.

As the WSJ notes, the proposed "crisis" plan is the "other leg of an intervention plan considered by the government" namely, the direct capital injection into Italian banks that would add up to €40 billion in capital to the banking sector", the one we profiled previously. It is also the plan that Merkel supposedly shut down before it got off the ground. However, Europe had a Plan B up its sleeve.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has been interviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation over her use of a private email server to store classified information, her campaign spokesman has said.

"Secretary Clinton gave a voluntary interview this morning about her email arrangement while she was Secretary. She is pleased to have had the opportunity to assist the Department of Justice in bringing this review to a conclusion," Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill said after a three and a half hour interview.

"Out of respect for the investigative process, [Clinton] will not comment further on her interview," Merrill added.
Clinton was interviewed at FBI Headquarters in Washington DC.

At the end of the battle for Fallujah, a convoy of around 500 vehicles allowed Isis fighters to flee the city to Syria.

The Pentagon refused to bomb the convoy because the vehicles belonged to civilians and they were probably transporting the wives and children of some jihadists.


However, the Iraqi army decided to bomb it, destroying more than 200 vehicles and killing their occupants.

Iraqi soldiers are convinced that the Pentagon had received instruction to let the CIA advisers, that were training the jihadists, escape.

Guys, this is not a joke. Those who understand French can listen and hear for themselves:

Here is what he actually said:

"You need to know that those who observe us from afar are worried. I have have seen, listened and heard many leaders of other planets and they are very worried because they wonder about the course the EU will follow. So we have to reassure both the Europeans and those who observe us from afar" (by the way - this section was removed from the official transcript of his speech)

Sure, the senile (drunk?) man meant to say "plusieurs des dirigeants de notre planète" (many leaders of our planet) and it came out "plusieurs des dirigeants d'autres planètes" (many leaders from other planets), but this is still telling. To think that this is the kind of person who "heads" (at least formally) the EU is both hilarious and depressing.

Good thing that the EU is totally irrelevant.