Author: Steven Sahiounie

The need for preventive measures in Russia amid the coronavirus pandemic should be reassessed after April 1, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Friday. “There is still a lot of time before April 22 [date of a nationwide vote on constitutional amendments],” Peskov said, commenting on whether Moscow had considered Tehran’s experience on holding elections amid the spread of coronavirus, TASS reports. “As you know, all preventive measures in Moscow, the Moscow Region and starting from today in St. Petersburg will be in effect until April 1,” Peskov said. “Then we will have to thoroughly weigh up the situation…

The Iraqi military and the presidency have condemned new US airstrikes, saying they killed soldiers, police officers and civilians overnight. “The Iraqi Presidency condemns airstrikes on several bases in Iraq, including a recently opened airport in the Holy City of Karbala which led to the death of security forces and civilians,” the presidency said in a statement on Friday. The Iraqi military also denounced the US strikes as a targeted aggression against the nation’s official armed forces and a violation of its sovereignty. According to the Iraqi military statement, three soldiers, two police officers and one civilian were killed in the attacks. The…

Turkey and Russia have agreed to begin joint patrols along a key highway in Syria’s northwestern province of Idlib as part of a recent ceasefire agreement between the two sides, Turkey’s defense minister says. “Both sides have signed the prepared text, and it has entered into force. We will see the first application of this with joint patrols on March 15 along the M4 highway,” Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency quoted Hulusi Akar as saying on Friday. His remarks came after four days of talks between Russian and Turkish officials in Ankara aimed at working out the details of a…

By Michael Jansen Lebanon’s decision to default on the repayment of a $1.2 billion Eurobond was inevitable. Prime Minister Hassan Diab was absolutely right to put d needs of the Lebanese over the timetable for paying the country’s debilitating debts to international creditors. Lebanon should repay some $4.6 billion this year at a time Central Bank reserves have fallen to $20-30 billion. Diab revealed Lebanon’s debt now stands at $90 billion, or 170 per cent of GDP and pledged to restructure the debt as well as reduce the country’s outsized banking sector. Beirut can expect tough negotiations with creditors because governments have,…

By Stephen Lendman The longest bull market in US history began on March 9, 2009. It ended on March 11, 2020 when the Dow average closed down 20% from its 29,551.42 February 12, 2020 all-time closing high. The same goes for the S & P 500 and Nasdaq — the former way down from its 3,386.15 closing high, the latter far below its 9,817.18 record high valuation. According to stock market metrics used by most analysts, US equities reached bubble levels greater than before the 1929 crash and dot com peak. Even after declining around 20% through March 11, plunging…

By Michael Halpern The White House held dozens of meetings about coronavirus response that excluded government experts because the discussions were unnecessarily classified over the objections of HHS Secretary Alex Azar, reports Reuters. Experts were not just barred from speaking openly about what we knew about the emerging pandemic. Apparently, they weren’t even allowed in the room. “It is not normal to classify discussions about a response to a public health crisis,” an unnamed official from the Republican George W. Bush administration told the wire service. Yet this is President Trump’s approach to nearly every public health and environmental threat: find some way to exclude…

Steven Sahiounie, journalist and political commentator The western media has focused on Idlib as the last ‘rebel’ held area in Syria; however, it is held by Al Qaeda, not Syrian rebels.  The Syrian rebels, aka “Free Syrian Army” , ceased to exist years ago, when the Al Qaeda terrorists arrived through Turkey, supported by the US-NATO-EU bloc.  The western media have focused only on the suffering of the civilians in Idlib; however, they fail to acknowledge those civilians are not from Idlib.  The original residents of Idlib left years prior when the terrorists occupied the area. The people of Idlib…

An Iraqi security source says an unspecified number of soldiers from the US-led military coalition, which is purportedly fighting the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group, has arrived at the Ain al-Asad air base housing US and other foreign troops in the western Iraqi province of Anbar for unknown reasons. The source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Arabic-language al-Sumaria television network that the soldiers have left their former base south of the Iraqi town of al-Qa’im, located nearly 400 kilometers northwest of the capital Baghdad and near the Syrian border, and landed at the base aboard military cargo aircraft on Monday. The source added that the soldiers are of Norwegian, Danish and American nationalities,…

The so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) says 200 Takfiri militants, whom Turkey has transported from restive areas in northern Syria to Libya to fight alongside Turkish military forces, have managed to flee from the North African country and sneak into Europe. The Britain-based war monitor, citing sources requesting anonymity, said on Monday that nearly 40 of the Takfiris were members of the Hamzat terrorist group, who are wreaking havoc in the Turkish-controlled and predominantly Kurdish town of Afrin in Syria’s northwestern province of Aleppo. The sources noted that a new batch of militants from the so-called Mu’tasim Division is going to be moved to…

Saudi Arabia has been the world’s largest arms importer over the past five years and has boosted by 130 percent its major arms imports, a study by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) shows. The results of the study, published on Monday, also showed that the Riyadh regime accounted for 12 percent of global arms imports during the period from 2015 to 2019. “Arms imports by countries in the Middle East increased by 61 per cent between 2010–14 and 2015–19, and accounted for 35 per cent of total global arms imports over the past five years. Saudi Arabia was the…