Terrorist group Al-Nusra Front is receiving daily arms shipments across the border from Turkey, the Russian General Staff says. The Al-Qaeda offshoot used the truce between government forces and moderate rebels in Syria to regroup and renew hostilities. Al-Nusra Front remains a major destabilizing factor in Syria, Lt. Gen. Sergey Rudskoy told journalists on Friday. "Damascus is being continuously shelled from Eastern Ghouta. There were numerous attempts to capture power station near Homs and block the road connecting Aleppo and Damascus. The flow of trucks carrying weapons and ammunition from Turkey continues, with border crossings reported on daily basis," he said.

The general added that Al-Nusra Front attacks are confirmed by other nations as well, and that they agree with Russia's assessment of the negative impact of the militant group. "It's obvious that the terrorist group, which operates in Aleppo and Idlib provinces, is currently the biggest stumbling block for the process of expanding the truce to new territories in northern Syria," Rudskoy said. Al-Nusra Front benefited from the truce because some of the territories under its control are mixed with those, which were designated as held by so-called moderate rebel forces and which are excluded from Russian airstrike missions, he stressed. Rudskoy also blasted Turkey for continued shelling of Kurdish forces across the border.

The United States used the ceasefire in Syria to let an army to infiltrate the country, Syrian Ambassador to Russia Riyad Haddad told Sputnik.

The United States used the ceasefire in Syria to let an army of many thousands of armed militants infiltrate the country, Syrian Ambassador to Russia Riyad Haddad told Sputnik.

"The United States used the February 27 initiative [ceasefire] in order to let an army of many thousands of militants with an enormous stock of weaponry to enter Syrian territory," the ambassador said in an interview.

In the United States, the failed government drug policies are a common source of outrage among politically progressive people. The Rockefeller Drug Laws of New York, eventually turned into a national policy with the "War on Drugs" of the Reagan era, have done very little to combat the scourge of addiction. Prison sentences have gotten longer, the number of people locked up has grown astronomically larger, and the budgets of police departments have increased — all while the drug cartels just keep getting bigger.

In the mind of many Americans, calls for action against narcotics are associated with neoconservative political forces. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan rose to power by denouncing campus anti-war activists, many of whom embraced a counter-culture lifestyle and recreationally used marijuana and hallucinogens.

Despite statistics showing that drug use is a problem throughout all strata and ethnic groups in the United States, the media has made the word "drug dealer" synonymous with "African-American male" in the mind of millions of people. Calls from politicians to "get tough on crime" and wage a "war on drugs" often serve as innuendo for a fascistic appeal to "lock up those dangerous Black people" and "keep white people safe."

There is plenty to criticize about the manner in which the US government has responded to the problem of drug use and addiction. However, the American situation and the way the drug issue lines up in US political discourse should not taint the way global issues are understood, and how political forces around the world are viewed.

To say that Hillary did not react properly to the damning State Department Inspector General report which yesterday found that she broke numerous government rules by setting up her own email server, would be a gruesome understatement.

As a reminder, Hillary's kneejerk response was to plead ignorance and claim that she was merely doing what her predecessors had done before, a claim that was promptly refuted, which was followed by her spokesman Brian Fallon appearing on CNN and saying that the Obama appointed IG had an "Anti-Clinton" bias by releasing the report.

Things however turned decidedly worse for Hillary when even the rabidly pro-Clinton channel MSNBC decided to tear Hillary apart for what is now an insurmountable mountain of lies.

It took place early today when MSNBC host Joe Scarborough slammed Hillary Clinton, calling on the Democratic presidential front-runner to "stop lying" about her personal email account.

"It's pretty remarkable," he said on "Morning Joe" of Clinton's response to a watchdog report that found Clinton and her top aides did not comply with policy while she served as secretary of State as cited by The Hill. "I don't understand why you put out a statement like that," Scarborough added. "Stop lying, stop digging."

The Iraqi government, formed in 2003 after Saddam Hussein's regime had been overthrown by the US invasion, was fully controlled by "inspectors" from the United States and its allies, a former Iraqi Defense Minister, Hazem Shaalan, told RT.

"I was not independent in my ministry," Shaalan said. "Inside the ministry, there were American inspectors in each department. There were also the British and Australians. There was not a single one department in the ministry, where there would be no inspectors."

The former defense minister also revealed that the first post-Saddam Iraqi government was not elected but instead was fully appointed by Washington.

Interim Prime Minister of Iraq Ayad Allawi, who held office from 2003 to 2005, was "among the first to be appointed [by the US]. We were all appointed by Americans, by [Lewis Paul ] Bremer [top civilian administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority of Iraq]. The first [post-Saddam] Iraqi government was appointed directly by Bremer,"Shaalan said adding that "no elections were held."

The former minister also emphasized that all decisions taken by the prime minister at the time required approval by US authorities. At the same time, this government was protected by the US authorities, he added. "Those, who were working with Americans, were relieved from responsibility for any faults in their work," Shaalan said during the interview.

As most commentators had predicted, Putin has agreed to exchange Nadezhda Savchenko for 2 Russians citizens accused by the Junta of being terrorists. To be honest, I am deeply disgusted by the fact that this rabid Nazi was allowed to walk free. Of course, I understand that IF the two Russians captured by the Ukies were really any kind of intelligence officers, Putin just had to obtain their release. I am personally dubious that Alexandrov and Erofeev are really officers of the 3rd Spetsnaz GRU Brigade (which is what the Ukies claim), but that does not mean that this is impossible or even unlikely. The GRU has most definitely deployed special forces in the Donbass region, so I would not dismiss this version completely.

Whatever may be the case, these two are now reunited with their wives:

NATO's invasion of Moldova foiled thanks to coordinated actions of many nations' patriots

It's hard to overestimate the value of planning in advance, especially when it comes to getting reservations in popular restaurants and invading countries by military force.

In the week of the May 9th Victory Day two significant failures took place each one remarkable in its own way. Each event went completely unreported by the Western corporate and government media, but was discussed on Social Media.

[The followings is an excerpt. Look for a full version of this investigation in the June release of my new book: "Scott Humor: Rumors, Speculations and Investigations of the First Hybrid War"]

In the following three weeks after the incident with the USS Florida, while Russia was preparing for Victory Day celebrations and all eyes were on Moscow, attention of Ukrainians was fully concentrated on the visit of Victoria Nuland to Kiev on April 26th allegedly to discuss the implementation of the Minsk II Agreement and the future elections in Donetsk and Lugansk republics. Since the day when President Putin said that the republics can have their elections anytime they want, the question of these elections ceased to be a subject of blackmail toward the Kremlin. It appeared that the true reason for Nuland's visit could be located to the west of Kiev, rather than the east.

Just recently, Robert D. Kaplan, a former Stratfor's Chief Geopolitical Analyst, and currently a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) has published a book "In Europe's Shadow" where he lays out a plan to reunite Romania with "its lost province of Moldova."

Four of the top five Global Fortune 500 corporations are involved in petroleum refining. Together with big-finance and industrial giants like big-auto and utility monopolies, big-oil dominates the global economy.

The monopoly it enjoys grants it the unwarranted power and influence it has wielded throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. And because big-oil is integrated into big-finance and other corporate-financier monopolies through various mutual interests, its influence reaches even further still.

The ability to manipulate prices in the markets, starve or bolster any particular nation by targeting energy essential for modern civilization constitutes a weaponization of energy. However, despite this immense power, there are some who claim big-oil's days are numbered. On one hand they are wrong, on the other, they are absolutely right.

Text of Abayomi Azikiwe's presentation to Left Form, City University of New York, May 22, 2016

In February of 2008 under the administration of President George W. Bush, Jr., the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) was officially launched with its base in Stuttgart, Germany.

The reasoning behind the creation of AFRICOM has evolved over the last eight years from being a necessary security measure to protect vital American interests on the continent to a mechanism designed to assist post-colonial African states to enhance their national security apparatuses in light of the so-called "war on terrorism", by then in full operation some four to five years after the invasion of Iraq and Haiti, and six-and-a-half years after the Pentagon occupation of Afghanistan.

There was much controversy within the African Union (AU) member-states over whether AFRICOM should establish its headquarters on the continent. This idea initially was rejected by the Pentagon due to this objection by numerous African states of varying political outlooks and governmental systems.

At this time, 2007-2008, the U.S. had initiated a war in Somalia in order to prevent the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) from fully consolidating power in that Horn of Africa nation fractured since 1991 after the collapse of the regime of Mohamed Siad Barre, a close ally of Washington. The administration of President George H.W. Bush in its final days had deployed 12,000 Marines to Somalia in December 1992, under the guise of responding to a humanitarian crisis of food deficits and internal conflict.

I am a lifelong FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) Democrat and therefore am anything other than prejudiced against the Democratic Party. But, that Party died when Bill Clinton became President and undid FDR's regulations on the megabanks and FDR's AFDC income program for children in poor families, and when Clinton replaced that with restoration of Wall Street's control over America (like before FDR, only a more convoluted form of it).

However, the way in which both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton endanger all people's lives and property and health and welfare, has to do with something else, something that's even more evil than what Bill Clinton did, and it's the Obama-Clinton (that's Secretary of State and now Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton) foreign policy, to overthrow the leaders of nations who are allied with or supportive of Russia — such as most recently Syria's Bashar al-Assad, but before that Ukraine's Viktor Yanukovych, and before that Libya's Muammar Gaddafi. It's no mere coincidence that all three had had cordial relations with Russia.

George W. Bush's 2003 overthrow of yet another pro-Russian head-of-state, Saddam Hussein, had already done enormous damage not only to Iraq but to the U.S., and yet Obama and Clinton are at least as determined to surround Russia by enemies, as Bush was; and they now even support the installation, on-and-near Russia's very borders, of a 'Ballistic Missile Defense' system that's actually designed to disable Russia's ability to retaliate against a U.S. surprise nuclear attack on Russia — the BMD is astoundingly aggressive, especially considering that whereas in 1991 the Soviet and then Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev terminated both the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact on the basis of an understanding from George Herbert Walker Bush and his agents, that NATO would not move "one inch to the east", this crucial promise from the U.S. government was violated by Bill Clinton's extending NATO into the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland; and by Bush's son Bush then extending NATO into Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia; and by Obama then extending NATO into Albania and Croatia and trying to bring into it also Ukraine and some other nations bordering or near Russia.

American President JFK didn't allow the Khruschev regime to place nuclear missiles 90 miles from the U.S. in Cuba in 1962, and Russian President Putin can't stand the Obama regime to place nuclear missiles right on Russia's borders, but it's happening now, and it endangers us all — not only the Russian people. Post-communist Russia is vastly different than the communist USSR was, and the U.S. government's treating it even more aggressively than the USSR ever was treated is simply mega-criminal and can be 'justified' only on the basis of lies.