Russian President Vladimir Putin predicted the US ambitions to rule the world, experts said. Putin clearly identified a documented US drive to dominate the world in his 2007 Munich speech, but nations around the world continue to resist it, American and European scholars told Sputnik.

"President Putin is obviously aware of the fundamental tenets of neo-conservative US foreign policy since 2001," California State University Emeritus Professor of Political Science Beau Grosscup, an author and terrorism analyst, told Sputnik. That plan was spelled out clearly in the 1992 Pentagon Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) authored by Paul Wolfowitz and future Vice President Dick Cheney to maintain the United States as the sole architect of the post-Cold War landscape, Grosscup noted. "[The plan] includes by-passing existing international institutions, the United Nations in particular, for unilateral reliance on military power, backed by ad hoc alliances," Grosscup pointed out.

The plan also included a Full Spectrum Doctrine that said the United States should be able to fight and win numerous wars, including nuclear ones, for regime change purposes in rogue nations, and that it should prevent the rise of competing powers such as Russia, China and Europe, Grosscup added.

NATO is deploying tanks and military equipment to a series of caves in Norway. They have been largely redundant since the end of the Cold War, but now the alliance is stocking up on hardware, which will be deployed near NATO's border with Russia.

It may seem like something from a James Bond movie, but NATO has been operating a slick operation in hillside caves built in the Norwegian countryside for decades. However, now the US-led alliance feels it is time to beef up its military presence, to prepare for what it perceives as a Russian threat.

The U.S. believes that airstrikes in Iraq and Syria have destroyed more than $500 million in cash that ISIS used to pay its fighters and fund its terror and military operations.

That is probably a low estimate, as one U.S. official told ABC News that the figure is in "the high hundreds of millions of dollars."

As part of the effort to weaken ISIS, the U.S. military has struck at ISIS's finances, particularly its lucrative oil smuggling enterprise in Syria that provides revenue for its operations.

Britain's former ambassador to Syria has compared the UK's intervention against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) in the country to a "dog returning to its own vomit." He has been accused of being an 'apologist' for President Bashar Assad.

Peter Ford accused Britain's involvement in the US-led coalition of "prolonging the agony" of Syrians, arguing the UK should have learned from its foreign policy "failures" in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

The former ambassador, who served in Damascus from 2003 to 2006, said it is "time to get real" that Syrian president Assad would not be overthrown, calling the West's current policy "wishful thinking."

© Unknown

Originally appeared at Komsomolskaya Pravda. Translated by Julia Rakhmetova and Rhod Mackenzie

The authors are war reporters from Russia's largest circulation daily. They've covered just about every conceivable recent hot spot - Iraq, Libya, Chechnya, Ukraine etc. This is their latest report from the ruins of Aleppo, where people survive despite being occupied by al-Nusra.

Haytham, 9 and sister Lena, 6 climb the high embankment between two half ruined high-rise buildings, their small hands maneuvering around the barbed wire. A few movements and they are at the top of this former barrier of concrete debris. Rebels built it in 2013, and when the Syrian army drove the Islamists from deep in the blocks, they left the barricades - just in case. Haytham and Lina come this way twice a day - to school and back home.

A Russian draft resolution condemning any plans for foreign military intervention and warning against violations of Syrian sovereignty has been rejected by the US and French ambassadors, as having 'no future' ahead of a UN Security Council meeting.

The Moscow-proposed draft calls on all states to avoid "provocative rhetoric and inflammatory statements" that could further incite foreign interference in Syria's internal affairs, instead of promoting a political settlement to the conflict.

No one wants to disrespect the dead. But we disrespect the truth to hail his legal mind and phony, grand principles.

George Orwell once noted that when an English politician dies "his worst enemies will stand up on the floor of the House and utter pious lies in his honour." Antonin Scalia was neither English, nor technically speaking a politician, but a similar tradition can be witnessed in the form of the praise now being heaped on him.

For example prominent liberal legal academic and former Obama administration lawyer Cass Sunstein has just offered the opinion that Scalia "was not only one of the most important justices in the nation's history, he was also among the greatest." Scalia's greatness, Sunstein claims, "lies in his abiding commitment to one ideal above any other: the rule of law."

Sunstein's assessment strikes me as not merely wrong, but as the precise opposite of the truth. Scalia was not a great judge: he was a bad one. And his badness consisted precisely in his contempt for the rule of law, if by "the rule of law" one means the consistent application of legal principles, without regard to the political consequences of applying those principles in a consistent way.

For Hillary Clinton, these are high roller stakes in Nevada after losing New Hampshire in a landslide and essentially tying in Iowa.

She has decided to stay in Nevada through the caucus on Saturday. CBS News spoke to her at her Las Vegas campaign office.

SCOTT PELLEY: What do you think Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have tapped into? It's a powerful thing.

HILLARY CLINTON: Look, I do think, Scott, people are angry. People feel here government's not working for them. The economy's not working. The political system is not working. But I also see in the eyes of the people I'm meeting with, "Okay, tell me something I can believe. Don't over-promise. Tell me what I can believe you will do for me and my family." And that's what I've tried to do.

Reports say a source close to Putin claims Russia warned Erdogan of readiness to use tactical nuclear weapons to defend Russian strike force in Syria from Turkish attack.

The US investigative journalist Robert Parry has made an astonishing claim - and one that has gone completely unnoticed.

He is reporting that the Russian government has warned Erdogan that Russia is prepared to use tactical nuclear weapons to defend its Syrian strike force from Turkish attack.

Billionaire Ken Griffin paid about $500 million for two paintings by Abstract Expressionist masters in one of the largest private art deals ever, according to people familiar with the transaction.

Griffin, founder of Chicago-based hedge fund firm Citadel, bought works by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning from David Geffen's foundation, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is confidential.

The deal, completed in the fall, is a record for both artists and exceeds the last high mark for a private sale, the $300 million that Qatar Museums paid for Paul Gauguin's painting "When Will You Marry?" Griffin's purchase preceded a slowdown in the art market in the second half of 2015. Sales of Impressionist, modern, postwar and contemporary art at Sotheby's and Christie's in London earlier this month fell from a year ago.

"In order to own the greatest art historical objects of our time one has to go above and beyond to obtain them," said Abigail Asher, a partner at art advisory firm Guggenheim Asher Associates Inc. in New York, who wasn't involved in the transaction.

Zia Ahmed, a spokesperson for Citadel, declined to comment.

Griffin bought de Kooning's 1955 oil on canvas titled "Interchanged" -- also known as "Interchange" -- for about $300 million and Pollock's 1948 "Number 17A" canvas for about $200 million, one of the people said. The de Kooning fetched $20.7 million in 1989, then an auction record for the artist and more than three times the highest pre-sale estimate of $6 million, according to Artnet, which tracks auction prices. Pollock's work was featured in a 1949 Life magazine article that helped make him a household name.