In Mosul, by a strange coincidence, there are no journalists, activists or volunteers, the ministry spokesman has noted.

The coalition has delivered 21 air strikes on Iraq's Mosul and its suburbs in the past day alone whereas neither Russian nor Syrian warplane have been used in Syria's Aleppo for more than two weeks, Russian Defense Ministry Spokesman Igor Konashenkov said on Tuesday.

"Mosul is being bombed daily from B-52H American strategic bombers, F/A-18 bombers based on USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier and from Rafaele M base on the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle. In the past day alone, the coalition warplanes flied 25 sorties and delivered 21 air strikes on the city and its suburbs," he said.

Meanwhile, the Russian and Syrian warplanes "have performed no flights in Aleppo for more than two weeks," he stressed.

"As bad as it is the folks above the President make the decisions. They may have decided on Trump. These things do not happen by accident."

Thus spoke a high-level US business mover and shaker with secure transit in rarified Masters of the Universe-related circles, amidst the utter political chaos provoked by head of the FBI James Comey's latest bombshell.

It's virtually established by now that US Attorney General Loretta Lynch told Comey not to release his letter to Congress. But Comey did it anyway. If he had not, and a scandal would - inevitably - spring up after the US presidential election, Lynch would be perfectly positioned to deny she knew anything, and Comey would be on the firing line.

Lynch is a certified Clinton machine asset. In 1999 then-President Bill Clinton appointed her to run the Brooklyn US Attorney's office. She left in 2002, taking the private practice revolving door. She was back to the Brooklyn office in 2010, urged by Obama. Five years later she became the 83rd US Attorney General, replacing the dodgy Eric Holder.

A plausible case has been made that Comey took his fateful decision based on a serious internal revolt at the FBI - led by key people he trusts — as well as being egged-on by his wife.

Yet one of the key questions that refuse to go away is why the FBI waited until 11 days before the US presidential election to supposedly "find" an email trove on certified sexting pervert Anthony Weiner's laptop.

Despite an anti-corruption rule that was designed to reduce the financial industry's political power, top officials from the investment firm BlackRock hosted Hillary Clinton at campaign fundraisers earlier this year. The cash -- which poured in through a loophole in the law — came in as BlackRock's federal contracts to manage billions of dollars of retiree assets will be up for renewal during the next president's term.

In 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission looked to stop campaign donations to public officials from financial firms seeking to convince those officials to hire them to manage public employees' retirement assets. The agency enacted a pay-to-play rule that applied such a restriction to state and local officials. The rule, however, was structured in a way that effectively exempted federal agencies from its restrictions -- and it was created even though a major federal agency had just been plagued by an investment-related influence-peddling scandal.

In practice, the gap in the rule allows BlackRock executives to raise big money for presidential candidates who -- if they win -- will appoint the officials that run the federal Thrift Savings Plan, which awards contracts to manage retirement assets for nearly 5 million current and former federal employees. The loophole also allows Wall Street executives to give cash to presidential candidates, even as those executives' firms get deals to manage -- and earn fees from -- investments for the federal government's separate pension insurance agency, which is run by presidential appointees.

In all, the loophole in the SEC rule effectively leaves nearly a half-trillion dollars of retirement assets unprotected by the nation's major anti-corruption measure. Clinton's presidential campaign has raised more than $1 million from financial firms that are contracted to manage those assets.

Two SEC spokespeople, Ryan White and Judith Burns, declined to answer questions from International Business Times and MapLight about the pay-to-play rule carve-out for federal agencies.

In September 2011, Bob Graham, a former Florida governor who served as United States senator from 1987 to 2005, got a call from an Irish journalist, Anthony Summers, who told Graham he was working with his wife Robbyn Swan on a book about the 9/11 attacks. (Their book, The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11, was published later that year.) Sarasota figured into that story. Three of the hijackers who had flown planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had trained at aviation schools in nearby Venice, and President George W. Bush was reading to children at Sarasota's Emma E. Booker Elementary School when he learned about the attacks. Graham well knew those Sarasota connections, but Summers said he had discovered a new link between Sarasota and 9/11.

"He briefly told me about suspicious circumstances in Sarasota," Graham says, "and he agreed to meet me at the Miami airport."

Buried deep inside Saturday's New York Times was a grudging acknowledgement that the U.S.-armed "moderate" rebels in Syria are using their U.S. firepower to back an Al Qaeda offensive

A curious aspect of the Syrian conflict - a rebellion sponsored largely by the United States and its Gulf state allies - is the disappearance in much of the American mainstream news media of references to the prominent role played by Al Qaeda in seeking to overthrow the secular Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad.

There's much said in the U.S. press about ISIS, the former "Al Qaeda in Iraq" which splintered off several years ago, but Al Qaeda's central role in commanding Syria's "moderate" rebels in Aleppo and elsewhere is the almost unspoken reality of the Syrian war. Even in the U.S. presidential debates, the arguing between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton has been almost exclusively about ISIS, not Al Qaeda.

Though Al Qaeda got the ball rolling on America's revenge wars in the Middle East 15 years ago by killing several thousand Americans and others in the 9/11 attacks, the terrorist group has faded into the background of U.S. attention, most likely because it messes up the preferred "good guy/bad guy" narrative regarding the Syrian war.

Last Friday just 11 days prior to the November 8th election, FBI Director James Comey dropped the bombshell of the entire election year, stating that he is reopening the Clinton internet server investigation over new "pertinent" emails found on disgraced ex-Congressman Anthony Weiner's laptop. Weiner is the husband of Hillary's 20-year top aide and deputy campaign manager Huma Abedin. And as of Sunday evening, the Department of Justice and FBI obtained the warrant necessary to begin analyzing 650,000 emails (according to the Wall Street Journal) discovered by the FBI on Weiner's laptop in the course of a separate investigation involving Weiner's alleged sexting with a fifteen year old minor.

So nearly four months after James Comey announced to the world back in early July that the FBI investigation was closed and that he would not seek an indictment against Hillary Clinton for violating any federal laws, now suddenly a tectonic shift has taken place and for the Clinton crime family, the shit may finally be hitting the fan. As a result, humanity might be spared from perishing in the nuclear holocaust that would virtually be a done deal should warmongering Hillary become president. She's all but promised war against Russia, China and Iran, including military retaliation against any hacking nations.

Back on October 3rd the FBI seized Weiner's laptop, iPhone and iPad, only to stumble upon a huge cache of emails stored on his laptop belonging to Weiner's wife Huma Abedin. It was then determined that incoming emails from Hillary Clinton as well as Huma's outgoing emails to her boss were found. The next logical questions are why did the FBI investigating team sit on it waiting over three weeks until last Thursday October 26th to finally bring this enormously significant matter to Comey's attention?... especially since an open revolt against Comey had been festering for months after he'd "cleared" Hillary of any criminal wrongdoing? And then it's been reported that without a warrant the FBI couldn't even begin reading the emails until it was finally obtained on Sunday October 30th.

Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin issued a blistering criticism of the UK on Monday, suggesting that Britain has little business overseeing questions on Yemen at the Security Council, given that it is also one the largest suppliers of arms to the Gulf states bombing the country.

Speaking at a meeting of the UN Security Council devoted to the situation in Yemen on Monday, Churkin pointed out that British weapons have been used by the Saudi-led coalition. "It's known, for example, that the UK is one of the largest suppliers of all sorts of weapons in the region, which are then used against Yemenis," the ambassador stressed.

"Since March 2015, The Guardian and The Independent have reported that London had sold weapons worth more than 3 billion pounds, or over $5 billion [to Gulf countries]. Pretty good money to line one's pockets with from a war, no? Civilians are being killed by these weapons." In this context, Churkin asked Security Council members to consider "how a country that has a clear material interest in the continuation of the conflict can oversee the Yemeni dossier to the Security Council?"

'[W]e'll never be called anti-Semitic again'

The latest emails from the Clinton campaign released by Wikileaks are radioactive. Two emails last year to campaign chairman John Podesta from Neera Tanden, head of the Clintonite thinktank Center for American Progress, lay bare the influence of Zionist money on the political process as nothing else has.

"Netanyahu was worth it...." "the far left hates me."

The emails relate to Tanden's controversial invitation to rightwing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to come to the thinktank, months after he had tried to destroy President Obama's Iran deal - for a fawningly-positive "interview" in which Tanden barely touched on the prime minister's racist appeals to win reelection in Israel earlier that year.

On November 11, the morning of the Netanyahu lovefest, Podesta asked Tanden for a bottom line on the event: "what has been gained and what has been lost?"

Tanden wrote back to him that afternoon that it was awful, but it was worth it, because CAP scored a big donor, and we won't be called anti-Semitic again.

The longer this soap opera drags on, it's becoming more and more evident that the Russian government did not 'hack' into the DNC, and Moscow is not feeding John Podesta's emails to Wikileaks. For those who are deeply invested in this now official conspiracy theory, this might be a hard pill to swallow.

The White House and the Hillary Clinton campaign are now married to the idea that 'Putin is hacking the US elections.' In response, the President is weighing his options - tougher economic sanctions, revoking diplomatic status to Russian envoys in the US, or even deploying his newly developed 'malicious cyber-activity' tools.

Even VP Joe Biden wants in on the action, threatening Moscow by saying,"We're sending a message. We have the capacity to do it."

It seems that where ever you turn nowadays, someone in Washington is issuing a threat against Russia. Are US-Russian relations really that bad, or does this trend have more to do with the defense industry and power struggles within the US?

What was previously a stance reserved for right-wing neoconservative hawks and Cold War hold-outs has now infected America's left-wing, and is a firm plank in the Democratic Party platform, as evidenced by Hillary Clinton's constant anti-Russian rhetoric throughout this 2016 election cycle. Along with the White House, Clinton has now transformed the Democrats into the vanguard of Washington's new anti-Russia movement.

If it weren't for the fact that he is absolute dictator of a country with a formidable army and nuclear missile technology, North Korean President Kim Jong Un, the 290 pound, 32 year-old ruler would be a clown figure. Unfortunately for world peace, Kim Jong Un, while he is playing games with his rockets and threats of war, is serving the long-term interests of the USA, especially the military industrial complex, the Pentagon and State Department, whose priority increasingly is to make an Asia Pivot of military power projection to contain and isolate the Peoples' Republic of China as well as Russia.

In the end of the 1990's I had the chance occasion to have a chat with the late James R. Lilley. Lilley was at the Davos World Economic Forum and by chance had sat at my dinner table together with a delegation from the China Peoples' Liberation Army. As I was the only westerner at the table he struck up a conversation, and as he saw I was more than conversant in global politics, he began talking, perhaps more than he should have with one he did not know.