The Syrian military claims to have closed the last kilometre gap in encirclement lines.

The Syrian military has just issued a statement that all remaining supply routes to the rebel forces in Aleppo have now been cut and that the rebels in eastern Aleppo are now completely surrounded.

The Syrian military has called on the rebels in Aleppo in effect to surrender by offering them a choice between either handing in their weapons and staying in the city - in which case they would presumably be taken prisoner by the Syrian army - or handing in their weapons and leaving the city. Given that the majority of the rebels in Aleppo are fanatical hardline Jihadists associated with Al-Qaeda's Syrian franchise - Jabhat Al-Nusra - it is unlikely most of them will agree.

Leaking the DNC emails is so contrary to Russian self-interest and policy that it is very unlikely the Russian authorities were behind it.

In what is an obvious exercise in diversion the Hillary Clinton campaign and the US media have sought to still the embarrassment caused by the leak of the emails from the Democratic Party's National Committee by conjuring up a fake storm around the issue of whether the Russian authorities ("Putin") might have been behind the leak.

Donald Trump's bizarre but possibly effective proposal that the Russians also publish the 30,000 emails Hillary Clinton deleted from her private server has taken the hysteria to an even higher level.

Just to clarify, Trump did not call on the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton's private emails. Since the emails he was referring to have already been deleted there would be no point. What he was doing was making a joke whilst reminding everybody that because of Hillary Clinton's own negligence the Russians are almost certainly already in possession of these emails.

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen wrote to House Republican Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee) to inform her that the issue had been "forwarded" to the IRS "Exempt Organization Examinations" program in Dallas.

"This program considers all referrals and will send you a separate acknowledgement when it receives your information," Koskinen wrote in a letter dated July 22, first reported by the Daily Caller.

However, it is not clear whether the agency will take any further action and the agency noted that, under the law, it cannot reveal "any actions we may take on this information."

The request for a review came from 64 House Republicans led by Tennessee Representative Marsha Blackburn, who have tasked the IRS, FBI, and Federal Trade Commission with examining the dealings of the Foundation.

"From the information we have been able to gather, it appears the Clinton Foundation is a 'pay-to-play' sham charity that needs to investigated," Blackburn said in a statement on Tuesday, according to Fox News. "The Clintons have used their Foundation to personally enrich themselves at the expense of American foreign policy. At a minimum, the Foundation's tax-exempt status needs to be reviewed and revoked immediately."

Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) has made a video public showing two men the group claims to be the attackers who broke into a French church and butchered a priest.

The footage released by the Amaq news agency, the propaganda site of Islamic State, reportedly shows the two men pledging allegiance to Islamic State and its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Screenshots from the video have been circulating online.

One of the church attackers was identified as Adel Kermiche, 19, who was awaiting trial on terrorism charges.

Governments of Central and Eastern European countries have been selling an "unprecedented" amount of weapons and ammunition to the Middle East in recent years, fueling armed conflicts in the troubled region, a new report claims.

According to the findings by a team of reporters from the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a group of European countries led by Croatia and the Czech Republic have been channeling their arms to the region since 2012.

Since then, they have gained over US$1 billion from such sales, despite some of the weapons ending up in the hands of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) terrorists, according to the report, which was published earlier on Wednesday.

The report, titled 'Making a Killing: The 1.2 Billion Euros Arms Pipeline to Middle East,' is the result of a year-long investigation.

It reveals "for the first time" that dozens of airplanes have been taking off from airfields in Eastern Europe, carrying deadly cargo "to Middle Eastern states and Turkey which, in turn, funneled arms into brutal civil wars in Syria and Yemen."

Governments of the selling countries have been well aware of where their exports are ending up, the report claims.

Moscow regards the development of the Russian Arctic as an issue which has long-term strategic importance. New military infrastructure, deployed on the perimeter of the country's northern border will ensure both the security of Arctic offshore natural resources and the sovereignty of the state.

Russia continues to expand its military presence in the Arctic region following the creation of Russia's Joint Strategic Command North (JSC North) back in 2014.

Two years ago, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu presented a plan which aimed to ensure the security of Russia's northern borders. The project envisaged covering Russia's Arctic territories with a network of radar stations and military bases and developing the region's infrastructure.

+ The big news of the morning was the vindication of a ground-breaking story that Margaret Kidder wrote for CounterPunch several months ago. Buried inside the 20,000 DNC emails released by Wikileaks were documents confirming a tricky financial scam orchestrated by the DNC and the Clinton campaign, whereby money that was meant for state Democratic parties was re-routed to the Clinton machine in order to evade campaign finance laws, thus making a mockery of Hillary's recent pledge to get the Big Money out of politics. We published Kidder's explosive piece on the first of April and it spread like lightning across the Net. Within a few days her exposé had been read by more than one million people and had received more than 50,000 Facebook shares (whatever that means). The Clinton machine shifted into attack mode, their default position. The Clinton trolls first started rumors that the story was an April Fools Day prank. When that attack floundered, the Clinton slime operation set their sights on the author. The article was written by Margot Kidder, the actress, they said with misogynistic condescension. You know, Lois Lane. You can't trust her. She had mental health issues. So much for feminism. This kind of viciousness is standard operating procedure in Clintonworld. But how wrong they were. Margot Kidder is one of the smartest people I know. She's very well read, is a determined researcher and writes with clarity and force. She's also fearless. Margot had the goods on them and now there's no doubt. Heroic work, Margot!

+ The Democrats are working overtime to transform the DNC email episode into a story about Russian hackers, Putin and Trump. One Democratic Party flack called it the most outrageous political break-in since Watergate. Anything to divert attention from the scandalous content of the emails. But there's little hard evidence that Russians were behind the hack. Cyber-expert Bill Blunden wrote to me this morning: "Note that Julian Assange has said: 'We have not disclosed our source, and of course, this is a diversion that's being pushed by the Hillary Clinton campaign.'

Jaroslaw Kurski and Piotr Stasinski embody the hope that once was Poland. They struggled against the Communist regime for years in the underground press and as Solidarity members. They built Gazeta Wyborcza, now one of the most influential newspapers in the country, after the 1989 fall of communism. They helped usher in a period of democracy and open debate, one that included cultural space for historians such as Jan Gross, a Polish-born American who courageously confronted the taboo topic of Polish complicity in the Nazi extermination of nearly all of Poland's 3 million Jews.

And then neoliberalism, imposed by global capitalism and international banks, began to spread its poison. Legions of unemployed or underemployed were cast adrift. Two million Poles, many of them young people desperate for jobs, have left to work abroad. Governmental austerity programs devastated cultural institutions, including public schools, the arts and public broadcasting. And finally, following a familiar death spiral, the October 2015 elections brought to power the nationalists and demagogues of the right-wing Law and Justice Party (PiS). There is no left-wing party represented in the parliament.

Not much of Poland's promise remains. PiS is rapidly rolling back constitutional rights. It blocks state media coverage of the fading political opposition, especially the Committee for the Defense of Democracy (KOD), which has held a series of protest demonstrations. PiS shamelessly uses the airwaves and the schools for rabid nationalist propaganda. The public broadcasting system—in which the party purged more than 100 staff members—twisted President Barack Obama's recent criticism of the Polish government's assault on the judiciary into praise for Polish democracy. And the ruling party has forced state institutions to cancel subscriptions to Gazeta Wyborcza and pressured distributors throughout the country not to display or sell copies of the newspaper.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has signed a new, updated edition of the country's military doctrine, following deliberations in the country's parliament. Significantly, while the doctrine does not directly identify the countries which serve as a threat to Belarus, it is hinted in no uncertain terms that NATO is the most likely threat.

According to paragraph 11.3 of the new doctrine, direct military threats to the country include "the expansion (or creation) of military-political alliances in the European region in which the Republic of Belarus is not included," and/or an attempt by such alliances to carry out "global functions."

Paragraph 11.4, meanwhile, alludes to the threat posed by "the strengthening of the offensive capabilities of states (or coalitions of states), including the unilateral establishment of strategic missile defense systems, precision-guided weaponry equipped with non-nuclear warheads for attacks against the military forces and infrastructure of the Republic of Belarus," and other measures "leading to a disruption of the existing balance of forces, as well as the building up of military infrastructure by states bordering Belarus."

A total of 82 percent of Russians approve of the Vladimir Putin's job as the Russian president, a poll conducted by the Moscow-based non-profit Levada Center revealed on Wednesday.

Approval rating of Putin's job as Russian president was 81 percent in June, while in July 2015 it totaled 87 percent.

In addition, 55 percent of Russian nationals approve of the work carried out by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, while 51 percent of Russians said they were satisfied with the work of the government as a whole.

Almost half of Russian citizens (46 percent) believe that the country was moving "in the right direction," while 37 percent expressed the opposite point of view and the rest could not give a definite answer.

The Parliament's work was approved by 42 percent of the respondents.

Thus, July's list of most trusted politicians in Russia was headed by President Putin, with 53 percent of support. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov followed suit, with 24 and 21 percent of public trust respectively, the poll revealed.

The survey was conducted on July 22-25 among 1,600 people aged 18 years and older across 137 settlements in the 48 regions of Russia.