Currently, combat actions in Syria are focused on the province and city of Aleppo, and the upcoming military operation will play a decisive role in determining the course of the war, American think tank Stratfor said in an article.

"With major military operations already underway in Aleppo and more to come, the province is emerging as the focal point of the war in Syria. Of the ongoing battles in the region, the largest and most decisive is the fight between rebels and loyalists for the divided city of Aleppo," according to Stratfor, also known as the "shadow CIA."

While the Syrian government tries to strengthen its position with a victory in Aleppo, the rebels are fighting for the "survival of their case."

The Americans are planning the largest increase of their military presence in Eastern Europe since the Cold War. The Pentagon announced plans to deploy a tank brigade in Europe in February 2017. Why not immediately, especially against the backdrop of the "Russian aggression?" As a matter of fact, there is no aggression. Instead, the United States occupies Europe.

Not that long ago, Pentagon officials announced plans to deploy 4,000 troops, 250 tanks and Bradley armored vehicles, self-propelled howitzers and 1,700 pieces of other wheeled vehicles and trucks in Eastern Europe.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, US Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Wark said that many countries of Eastern Europe questioned the readiness of the United States to protect them, especially against the background of the "Russian aggression." The above-mentioned measures were taken to prove otherwise.

British Prime Minister David Cameron tried to fend off criticism of an offshore trust maintained in the Bahamas by his father Ian Cameron and which he inherited upon his father's death in 2010. The details of the trust were contained in the massive tranche of documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, which were leaked to the media by the dubious International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), an operation funded by George Soros, the CIA-connected U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Ford Foundation.

In defending his connection to the tax-avoidance trust, Blairmore Holdings Inc., for which his father was a director, Cameron said, "We owned 5,000 units in Blairmore Investment Trust, which we sold in January 2010. That was worth something like 30,000 pounds." By "we," Cameron was referring to himself and wife Samantha, who jointly held the Bahamas trust. In related news, WMR has learned that the financial scandal involving both Blairmore Holdings, Inc. and the JR Central £2 million pay-off to Cameron has resulted in significant marital problems between David and Samantha Cameron and that a divorce is imminent.

However, according to senior British Conservative Party sources who spoke on background to WMR, Cameron had at least £2 million in offshore accounts. The money was paid to Cameron, according to the sources, as part of a deal by JR Central, a subsidiary of Japan Railways, to secure a lucrative contract to lay new rails for HS2, the new high-speed British rail system. When completed, the rail system was designed to be faster than the French TGV high-speed railway.

Any unilateral interference in internal affairs of sovereign states inevitably leads to chaos and power vacuum that breeds radical extremism, said Russian FM Sergey Lavrov, emphasizing mutual respect for international law as important stabilizing factor in global politics. "Interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states, and attempts to force them to adopt problem-solving recipes based on some alien patterns seriously undermine the stability of the international system, sometimes leading to chaos, creating a vacuum that is quickly filled by extremists, terrorists, as we are witnessing in the Middle East and Northern Africa," the Russian Foreign Minister said in an interview with journalists from Mongolia, Japan and PRK.

Speaking of the turbulence which is currently observed in international affairs, Lavrov noted that the importance of strategic partnership, specifically with BRICS, Eurasian Economic Union and Shanghai Cooperation Organisation countries, outlining the direction for this partnership to be one of respect for the foundations of international law, which in his words will prove to be "an important stabilizing factor" for the global politics.

In this context, Lavrov noted the significance of the ministerial meeting between Russia, India and China set for next week. He stressed, that this 'trio' provided the initial impetus for the creation of BRICS (an acronym standing for the association of five major emerging national economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), which became a "format that marked the beginning of a very important process in world politics."

The US should do everything it can to stop the terrorist flow from Turkey to Syria, Russia's envoy to the UN told the Security Council. Vitaly Churkin also voiced concern over the jihadist buildup around Aleppo, as it threatens the nationwide ceasefire.

The UNSC held a closed-door meeting as another round of peace talks is due to in Geneva. This will be the second meeting since the beginning of the truce brokered by Moscow and Washington in February.

While a fragile ceasefire is generally being observed in the war-torn country, UN envoy Staffan de Mistura told the Security Council via video-conference from Tehran that the escalation in Aleppo province, and in parts of Hama province and Damascus, are cause for concern.

Speaking to reporters at the end of the closed-door meeting, Churkin said de Mistura had confirmed that Al-Nusra Front "had launched an offensive in the region of Aleppo" against Syrian forces. The envoy also noted that during discussions some members of the Security Council voiced concern that the militant build up in Aleppo "may call into question" the upholding of the ceasefire.

Last week, U.S. President Barack Obama disingenuously called for international tax reform in the wake of the massive leak of millions of documents from Panamanian-based law firm Mossack Fonseca. "There is no doubt that the problem of global tax avoidance generally is a huge problem," Obama told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. "The problem is that a lot of this stuff is legal, not illegal."

In what amounted to a complete dog and pony show, meant to appease the masses, Obama said the Panama Papers illustrated the immense scale of tax avoidance by Fortune 500 companies, which is estimated at trillions of dollars worldwide. The calls for reform ring hollow as Obama remained conveniently mum on the companies operating within the US providing a tax haven for the world's elite.

The words of Andrew Penney, managing director of Rothschild & Co., were extremely clear to international investors, as noted in a written draft for a presentation in San Francisco in which he wrote that the U.S. "is effectively the biggest tax haven in the world."

One of these such havens is a single address in Wilmington, Delaware. 1209 North Orange Street, according to the Washington Free Beacon, has become known in recent years as the epicenter of U.S. corporate secrecy. The squat, split-level building is the official address of over 285,000 companies, many of which are looking to take advantage of Delaware's Panama-like secrecy rules, tax incentives, and business-friendly case law.

What sets this shell company factory aside from the rest is the fact that within those 285,000 business fronts, is a company owned by Democratic Presidential candidate, and likely the next president of the United States, Hillary Clinton.

As the Washington Free Beacon reports:

Hillary and Bill Clinton quietly set up two shell companies listed at "1209 North Orange Street" in 2008 and 2013, the Washington Free Beacon has found. The names of the companies, but not their location, were first made public in tax filings released by Hillary Clinton last year.

According to records, one of the Clintons' "1209 North Orange Street" companies is WJC, LLC, which was set up by Bill Clinton in 2008 as a pass-through for his consulting fees.

Another company at the same location, ZFS Holdings, LLC, was set up in February 2013, one week after Hillary Clinton left the State Department. Hillary Clinton received $5.5 million from her book publisher, Simon & Schuster, through the company.

Four members of Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) were reportedly arrested in an anti-terrorist operation aimed at detaining members of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL).

A total of 15 people were detained during the operation, according to 9 Eylül newspaper. The raid took place in the Turkish city of Izmir in early April.

The suspects were arrested at various addresses, and authorities conducted a search of their homes. Police found four rifles, documents, and various other materials related to IS.

An investigation revealed that the detainees participated in warfare and engaged in the training of newly-recruited jihadists to be sent to fight in clashes. They also engaged in the training of Savaş Yıldız, who committed acts of terrorism at the regional offices of the Party of Kurdish Peoples Democracy in Adana and Mersin in 2015.

Former US Senator Bob Graham (D-FL) took to the media on Sunday evening disclosing that 28 redacted pages from the 9/11 Report show that high-ranking members of the House of Saud provided financial assistance and direct support to the terrorist hijackers.

On Tuesday, Graham told the Tampa Bay Times that the White House called him to inform him that 28 redacted pages from the 9/11 Report were going to be declassified and made public.

The announcement, which the White House has yet to confirm, comes after the former elected official fought for years to gain public release of the documents, on the grounds that the American people deserve to know about the House of Saud's involvement in the most deadly attack ever perpetrated on US soil.

While most of humanity rejoices the liberation of Palmyra, some Western pundits have trouble deciding which is worse, the Islamic State or 'Assad'. After the most hardcore of the West's warmongering press finally acknowledged that the Syrian 'regime' had 'recaptured' Palmyra, accusations started flying that everything was 'Assad's fault' as he originally lost the city to ISIL. Moon of Alabama explains why this narrative is false. A better question to ask might be, how the Iraqi government installed by the US occupiers lost Mosul to ISIL, while the last of the US occupying forces where still in the country? Either the US cannot take care and protect its client regimes, or (even worse) creation of the Islamic State was in US interests and plans all along.

But how did the Islamic State capture its capital, Raqqa? It did not. Raqqa was captured in March 2013 by Syrian rebels, i.e. "FSA" and their al-Nusra Front allies. Most likely the operation happened like the capture of Idlib in March 2015, under the command of a US operations room in Turkey and with full access to real time American satellite imagery. The Wikipedia article on the battle has more details:

Battle of Raqqa - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The battle, on the opposition side, was primarily led by the Islamist jihadist group Al-Nusra Front. Ar-Raqqah was not initially a rebel stronghold. The city itself saw several small protests at the beginning of the uprising, but these soon subsided. The anti-Assad elements within the city also remained peaceful until the end of 2012.

Furthermore, previous pro-government tribal coalitions and the presence of more than a half million displaced Syrians, mostly from Idlib, Deir ez-Zor and Aleppo, served to strengthen the Syrian government's opinion that Ar-Raqqah was relatively safe. By early 2013, the Syrian opposition had secured much of the north of Syria, but had yet to seize control of a major city. The rebels planned an offensive to seize control of Ar-Raqqah where government forces were in control, effectively giving the opposition control over a much greater portion of northern Syria.

Nothing could be more symbolic of the decline of Europe and the rise of Eurasia than the construction of a modern railway from the Ethiopian capitol of Addis Ababa to a port on the Red Sea in Djibouti. The Rail line is being built by Chinese Civil Engineering Construction Corporation and China Railway Group (CREC). It replaces an old delapidated rail line built by the French during the period of European colonization of Africa at the end of the 19th Century.

What, where, when...

The Chinese rail company is going to make the entirely new 656-kilometer electric rail line from the Ethiopian capitol of Addis Ababa to the Red Sea Port of Djibouti fully operational at most any moment now. The project will create 5,000 local jobs, and allow Ethiopia to boost exports of key commodities such as coffee and sesame. It also offers the opportunity to get Ethiopian workers trained by engineers from the Chinese Civil Engineering Construction Corporation. To date 250 Ethiopian students have been trained in China in the railway sector, a good address as China today is the world's leading builder of railways.

It will cost $1.2 billion with the Export-Import Bank of China financing 70 per cent and the Ethiopian government 30 per cent. It will be one of the first electric trains in East Africa, with a speed of 120 kilometres an hour. It will reportedly be easier and cheaper to maintain than the former French diesel locomotives, the last of which shut down in 2008, as it will be mechanised, relying on locally-produced hydropower to run.