India plans to purchase the Kalibr cruise missiles from Russia, the Russian Izvestia newspaper reports.

Izvestia explains that the Kalibr export version will have a significantly reduced flight distance - as short as 300 kilometers (186 miles]), in order not to violate the provisions of international agreements that prohibit the export of missiles with a greater flight distance.

"These will be, essentially, the same missiles as the ones used in Syria," a diplomatic source told the newspaper on Thursday.

Laura Bentz of Keybridge Communications describes her company as "a boutique PR firm — founded by a former writer for the Wall Street Journal — that specializes in writing and placing op-eds. With some of the country's most influential trade groups and global corporations as clients, we run many of the major op-ed campaigns in the U.S. We place roughly 3,000 op-eds per year."

On its website, Keybridge openly claims to be able to "brand a CEO" by putting op-eds into newspapers in "virtually every major city."

Less openly, Keybridge carefully markets its services with a PDF that names people for whom it claims to have written and placed op-eds.

For a mere $5000, Keybridge offers this service in the PDF:

First, we write a 500-800 word op-ed. Then we place it in one or more newspapers around the country. If we're pitching to a national audience, we guarantee that we'll reach at least 50,000 readers. Includes media monitoring.

Fresh from a visit south of the border to meet with Mexico's president, Donald Trump landed in Phoenix, Arizona late Wednesday afternoon to present what is anticipated to be his most in-depth immigration policy speech yet.

The Republican presidential nominee privately met with and held a press conference alongside Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto earlier Wednesday, but their formal remarks on immigration and trade were based on a "preliminary meeting" and did not go into any detail.

"There's a lot of value that can be created by both countries working beautifully together, and that, I'm sure, will happen," Trump said in Mexico to members of the press.

The head of an Iraqi resistance group says the Middle East region's woes have worsened ever since the onset of the United States "war on terror," Press TV reports.

Akram al-Kabi, the Secretary General of the Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba (HHN), which fights militancy throughout the war-scarred Iraq, made the remarks to Press TV in an exclusive interview, parts of which were broadcast on Wednesday.

"The United States has never played a positive role since its entry into the region. Problems and conflicts worsened with the US occupation of Iraq and, before that, Afghanistan," he said.

Biden's Balkan business is not only unfinished; it is unfinishable!

From the very first days of the Obama administration, the vice president Joe Biden has taken over running the U.S. foreign policy agenda for the former Communist bloc in Europe. This self-appointed mandate applied not only to the ex-Soviet states, the best known cases being Ukraine and Georgia, but also to the states of ex-Yugoslavia in the Balkans. He has met with the proverbially corrupt Balkan political leaders on many occasions, either at the margins of international gatherings, such as the annual Munich Security Conference, or when they visited Washington, DC., and he called them his friends.

Biden has also "toured" the Balkans himself, most recently in mid-August 2016, taking with him his entire extended family. In general, he has behaved like an imperial pro-consul for the Balkans. As I have written in an earlier article, in which I examined in great detail the Biden business in the Balkans, in both his statements and activities, Biden has embodied the essential spirit of the U.S. global hegemony. In order to justify hegemonic projects, he has been willing to turn the truth upside down, so that "fancy words covered up torture chambers and targeted killings, wars masqueraded as peace, and imperial dictates were presented as sovereign decisions of free nations."¹

In December 2014, I wrote an article on the intensification of the Chinese political and economic presence in the Balkans.¹ I discussed the Chinese relations with the Balkan states chronologically and underlined the importance of the annual "16+1" summits between China and 16 East-Central European states, including those states in the Balkans which are not EU members. I pointed out the special importance of the Balkans in the long-term Chinese geopolitical and geo-economic plans for Europe.

My article has been one of the very few that have delved into this matter from the standpoint of the Great Powers' rivalry in the Balkans. I claimed that the increased presence of China, even without any coordination with Russia, was making nervous the top decision makers in both Brussels and Washington. They knew that they could not match the types of credit and investment deals that China was able to offer the struggling economies in the Balkans. In fact, the economic model ingrained in the IMF and World Bank functioning is very different from the one propounded by the Chinese government-owned companies and banks. While the IMF and the World Bank are interested in the rapid ideological re-shaping of the economic sphere, including various socially painful, but ideologically justified austerity measures, the Chinese government is oriented toward funding long-term infrastructure projects, which over time demand the permanent presence of the Chinese workers, experts, and agents of influence. In this way, the local government officials, having become dependent on the Chinese economic and logistical support, inevitably fall more and more under the sway of the Chinese foreign policy. This is nothing new, or unique to the Balkans. In fact, we are witnessing the same process in some parts of Latin America and Africa.

Just as the corporate media is not reporting that the USA and Russia are on a collision course which can end up in nuclear war, the corporate media is not reporting that the Ukraine is falling apart. That does not mean, however, that this is not happening. It is. In fact, it has been for a long while already, but since that collapse is smoothed out by a lack of military action and by the political support of the Empire, it does not appear to be catastrophic (in the sense of causing a sudden dramatic change). But the signs are all over the place, ranging from the outright bizarre attack by Ukronazi saboteurs on Crimea (which, besides the group which was caught also involved at least two other groups conducting a diversionary reconnaissance by fire against the northeast of the Peninsula) to the quasi daily reports of an "imminent", but apparently never coming, Ukronazi attack against the Donbass. On the political front, the Ukrainian Jeanne d'Arc, Nadezhda Savchenko, is now accused of being a Putin agent because she advocates for negotiations with the DNR/LNR, while the regime in Kiev is trying to maintain its relevance to NATO hawks by offering to teach them "how to fight against the Russians". The reality, of course, is that financial support from the Empire to the Ukraine has now almost completely dried up due to, among other things, the realization that the Ukies can steal almost all the money they get, and that nobody buys the "the Russkies are coming!" canard anymore. Frankly, the Ukronazi project has outlived its utility and nobody gives a damn what will happen to the Ukrainian people.

And that is a huge mistake.

Somalia on the EU

It is impossible to estimate how many people are still living in the Ukraine today, but most experts believe that the figure is somewhere between 35-40 million people. The vast majority of them are struggling to make a living and their future looks very, very bleak. Remember Dmitri Orlov's five stages of collapse? They are:

Stage 1: Financial collapse. Faith in "business as usual" is lost.
Stage 2: Commercial collapse. Faith that "the market shall provide" is lost.
Stage 3: Political collapse. Faith that "the government will take care of you" is lost.
Stage 4: Social collapse. Faith that "your people will take care of you" is lost.
Stage 5: Cultural collapse. Faith in "the goodness of humanity" is lost.

Russian President Vladimir Putin believes that arrogance should not be among the traits of a true leader.

During a meeting with the students of the Vladivostok School #2, the Russian President told them about what it is like to be the head of state.

Anyone who wants to be considered a leader and get any nomination never should turn up their nose and think that they are the best. As soon as a person begins to believe in his or her superiority, from that moment, he or she becomes a loser," the Russian President said. "Ambition is good, arrogance is bad," Putin added.

In his statement, the president also praised the school's educational system and stressed that "one should learn new things during one's whole life." The Vladivostok School #2 was founded in 1990 and offers courses in six different foreign languages (English, French, German, Chinese, Korean and Japanese). It currently has over 1,380 students enrolled.

Thursday, September 1, marks Knowledge Day and the start of the school year in Russia.

Speaking before a group of veterans on Wednesday, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton gave perhaps her most hawkish speech to date, with sharp words villainizing Russia and promises to respond to cyberattacks with military force.

From the Duke Energy Convention Center in Cincinnati, where the 98th National American Legion convention is underway, Clinton focused on "American exceptionalism."


Explaining her view of the role the US plays in the world, Clinton stated that America is "the indispensable nation." She explained that US importance in the world is a serious responsibility, and that the actions Washington does and does not take have a great impact on the lives of people around the globe.

"When Vladimir Putin, of all people, criticized American exceptionalism — my opponent agreed with him — saying, and I quote, 'if you're in Russia, you don't want to hear that America is exceptional,'" Clinton remarked. "Well maybe you don't want to hear it, but that doesn't mean it's not true," she said.

Russia's Federal Tourism Agency proposes mutual visa-free group tourist exchanges with India, Vietnam and Iran, head of the agency Oleg Safonov said in an interview with TASS.

Currently, there are visa-free group tours between Russia and China, he said.

"We offer using the same mechanism (as with China - TASS) in our cooperation with India and Iran," he said, adding that this mechanism would also be attractive in cooperation with Vietnam.

Safonov highly praised the effectiveness of such an exchange with China.

"This is a really good mechanism, that has proved its effectiveness," he said.

Russia and China signed an intergovernmental agreement on visa-free tourist travel within organized groups of tourists (via travel agencies) in 2000.