"A foreign correspondent is someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it." —Tom Stoppard, Night and Day

The Crimean War, in mid-19th century, introduced the world to the cardigan, the raglan jersey, and the balaclava headdress. It also introduced a new profession: the foreign correspondent. And almost immediately after the war the axiom "truth is the first casualty of war" was born because of the falsehoods spread by foreign correspondents on both sides, not to mention Tennyson's overheated and wrong-headed poem.

Since then, as in any other profession, there have been capable and honest foreign correspondents and reporters who have been incompetent, ignorant or propaganda tools of their nation or their employers. Ernest Hemingway, a giant of American literature, didn't hesitate to color his coverage of the Spanish Civil War with propaganda for the side he favoured. A British daily reported that the Americans had been victorious at Pearl Harbor. Countless American foreign correspondents beat the Pentagon drum during the Vietnam War. More recently, "embedded" American journalists reported how the US forces had "liberated" Iraq.

Foreign correspondents can be notoriously uninformed and cavalier about the countries they report on: for example, Middle East foreign correspondents of Western media who speak Arabic are as rare as atheists in Mecca. Most Western correspondents thus depend on local "minders" and a dubious local media to report what's happening. The situation has worsened in recent years as Western media have closed news bureaus around the globe and lone correspondents cover whole continents. This has given rise to the "airport reporter"... the journalist who flies in to a hot spot for a few days and covers complicated conflicts with a few hundred words then flies away to chase another conflict.

Ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has described the Ukrainian crisis as "an abscess that sends fever through Europe and the whole world" and has called for an urgent meeting between the Russian and American presidents to secure a peaceful settlement to the issue.

In an interview with the Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily, Gorbachev noted that despite the fact that politicians belonging to his generation had managed to end the Cold War and the global confrontation between capitalist and socialist systems, the world remained unjust, militarized and violent. He reiterated the point that the blame for this lies with Western nations that hurried to celebrate their victory and paid little attention to cooperation with Russia on global security issues. Gorbachev added that the new global world required completely new rules of behavior and morals, and that these should be developed by all nations together.

The first and only Soviet president also pointed out that the sides that gained the most from globalization so far were shady financial structures that lived off artificial crises they organized all over the world, as well as organized criminal groups of global proportions.

"Financial structures reporting to no one were the fastest to adjust to globalization and make profits from it. They are inflating one market bubble after another and make billions literally from thin air. And these billions fall into the pockets of the circle of people that becomes narrower and narrower and these people dodge taxes. In recent days we saw new examples proving this and these examples were just the tip of the iceberg," Gorbachev told the paper, apparently hinting at the leaks that revealed the offshore operations of the Panama company Mossack Fonseca.

"And we have not yet mentioned the organized crime structures that are feeling quite comfortable in the globalized environment. These are illegal traders in weapons and drugs, human traffickers, cyber-criminals and of course terrorists," he noted.

Saudi Arabia has paid for 11 Conservative MPs to visit the oil-rich kingdom on 'parliamentary fact-finding' missions in the last several months, while continuing to wage its deadly airstrike campaign against Yemen, it has emerged. According to the latest version of parliament's register of interests, 11 MPs have declared "parliamentary fact-finding" visits paid for by the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Independent reports.

The MPs visited in two groups, the first in mid-February and the second in early April. Each trip, which included hotels and flights, cost between £1,500 and £3,700 (about US$2,150-5,320), according to the MPs' register of interests, where parliamentarians are required to report any gifts or donations. Among the MPs who reported the April trip were Edward Argar, Sir Alan Duncan, Sir Edward Garnier, David Jones, Kwasi Kwarteng and Helen Whately. Rehman Chisti, David Mackintosh, Mark Pawsey, Royston Smith and Martin Vickers visited the kingdom in February.

The visits come amid rising international pressure on the UK to suspend arms sales to Saudi Arabia, whose bombing campaign in Yemen has killed 6,400 and displaced hundreds of thousands more. In March a leaked report by a UN panel condemned "widespread and systematic" violence against civilians by Riyadh. The UN secretary-general, Save the Children, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the British Labour Party have all called on the UK government to halt its arms sales to the Gulf kingdom.

Yet figures compiled by the Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) earlier this week show that since Riyadh began its bombing campaign last March, the British government approved 122 military licenses for weapons and military hardware worth nearly £3 billion. Even the Home Office and the Foreign Office appear to be at odds about Riyadh's conduct in Yemen.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said that Athens would continue its joint efforts with other NATO states to improve the alliance's capabilities over the whole operational area in the Aegean Sea.

Athens will not tolerate the actions of Ankara violating the country's sovereignty in the Aegean Sea, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said Friday.

NATO ships have been deployed to the Aegean Sea for months to monitor migrant flows between Turkey and Greece. Athens claims that Ankara refuses to allow NATO ships to enter the maritime zone near some of the Greek islands, as Turkey considers them as its own territory.

Ukraine's experimental new transit route, which had been designed to bypass Russia via the so-called New Silk Road project, has proven a failure. Ukrainian Railways has announced that the train has returned home empty.

In mid-January, Ukraine launched a cargo train from its southwestern Black Sea port of Illichivsk to China via the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, making its way from the Black Sea to Georgia, and then on to Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, thus joining the Chinese-led Silk Road initiative.

Earlier this month, it was reported that the pilot project was stuck at the Kazakh-Chinese border due to a lack of prospective clients ready to fill it with cargo. The train had originally been scheduled to return to Ukraine at the end of March at the latest.

Jihadists are coming to Syria with the consent and support of the intelligence services of European states, Syria's ambassador to the UN and chief negotiator at the Geneva peace talks, Dr. Bashar Ja'afari, told Euronews.

Europe facilitates the passage of terrorists with EU citizenship to Syria and Iraq, the Syrian diplomat insists, stressing that"governments are responsible for every terrorist who comes from Europe."

"Today we have a new phenomenon called European terrorism. They claimed before that there was Arab and Islamic terrorism. Today we are victims of European terrorism, emanating from Brussels, Paris, London, Spain, Germany, Italy..."Ja'afari told Euronews.

"It's hard to believe that a terrorist who leaves Paris, London, Brussels, or Boston, or Australia and arrives in Syria without a visa, without a passport, through dozens of states and the Turkish-Syrian or Jordanian-Syrian border, has done so without intelligence services overseeing these operations," Ja'afari said.

Names in the Panama Papers link Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, fresh off a big win in New York, and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, to those who use offshore tax shelters.

Though the former secretary of state was quick to denounce the Panama Papers revelations, describing them as "outrageous tax havens and loopholes that super-rich people across the world are exploiting,"some of those found in the 11.5 million documents have connections with the Clintons dating back four decades.

A new report by McClatchy, one of more than 100 journalism outlets with access to the leaked documents, reveals a number of Clinton donors and associates used Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, "global provider for legal and trust services," for their offshore accounting.

9/11 Commission Work Plan Reveals FBI Found al Qaeda Member's U.S. Pilot Certificate Inside Envelope of Saudi Embassy in D.C. Investigators Sought to Examine Possible Political Influence on Examination of Saudi Government, Royal Family Links

As President Obama prepares to visit Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, his administration is under increasing pressure to declassify 28 pages that, according to many who've read them, illustrate financial links between the Saudi government and the 9/11 hijackers.

Meanwhile, a far lesser-known document from the files of the 9/11 Commission—written by the same principal authors as the 28 pages and declassified last summer without publicity and without media analysis—indicates investigators proposed exploring to what extent "political, economic and other considerations" affected U.S. government investigations of links between Saudi Arabia and 9/11.

The U.S. has only been at peace for 21 years total since its birth

In 2011, Danios wrote:

Below, I have reproduced a year-by-year timeline of America's wars, which reveals something quite interesting: since the United States was founded in 1776, she has been at war during 214 out of her 235 calendar years of existence. In other words, there were only 21 calendar years in which the U.S. did not wage any wars.

To put this in perspective:

* Pick any year since 1776 and there is about a 91% chance that America was involved in some war during that calendar year.

* No U.S. president truly qualifies as a peacetime president. Instead, all U.S. presidents can technically be considered "war presidents."

* The U.S. has never gone a decade without war.

* The only time the U.S. went five years without war (1935-40) was during the isolationist period of the Great Depression.

For a year-by-year timeline of America's major wars (1776-2011) go here.

As he does once a year, last week President Putin spent over three and a half hours answering 80 questions out of the 3+ million questions which were received. The show, which was aired live on Channel One, Rossiya-1 and Rossiya-24 TV channels, and the Mayak, Vesti FM and Radio Rossii, was an unprecedented success which was watched and commented upon by millions of Russians. You can read the full transcript of the show by clicking here, and the transcript of a conversation between Putin and the journalist corps following the show here.

The main Russian TV channel, Rossia-1, also aired not one, but two special talk-shows (see here and here) solely dedicated to a discussion of Putin's performance. These talk-shows are the famous "Evening with Vladimir Soloviev" - by far the highest visibility talk-show on Russian TV. Just for the record, Rossia-1 is the crown-jewel of the powerful and state-controlled All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK) media holding. Between the call-in show with Putin (3 hours and 40 minutes), the first talk show (2 hours and 12 minutes) and the second talk show (1 hour 44 minutes) the Russian public was exposed to a stunning seven and a half hours of discussion. Some will call it "propaganda", which can be viewed as negative or as positive, but which changes little. The main issue here is that this was a major, huge, public-communications effort. So what was the overall message which was conveyed by all this? Let me summarize it for you: