Author: Steven Sahiounie

Algeria swore in Abdelmadjid Tebboune as president on Thursday as the protest movement debates its response to his offer of dialogue to end a months-long political crisis. Tebboune, a former prime minister who casts himself as a reformer, was elected last week in a vote the opposition regarded as a charade intended to keep the ruling elite in power, Reuters said. The army saw Thursday’s election as the best way to end 10 months of weekly mass protests that helped oust Tebboune’s predecessor Abdelaziz Bouteflika in April. Since the election, the weekly Friday and Tuesday protests have gone ahead as…

At least five people, including three children, have lost their lives and several others sustained injuries when a car rigged with explosives went off in an area of Syria’s northeastern province of al-Hasakah, controlled by Turkish military forces and their allied militants ever since they launched a ground offensive against militants from the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG). The so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the attack took place on Thursday afternoon in Tal Halaf village, which lies west of the strategic border city of Ra’s al-Ayn. On November 26, a car bomb killed at least 17 people and wounded 20 others in…

Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that nothing can hold back yet another arms race and thus international security will be damaged if the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with the United States is not renewed. The Russian leader made the comments during his annual end-of-year marathon news conference in Moscow on Thursday, stressing that the US has not yet reacted to any Russian proposals over the treaty. “We are ready until the end of the year to extend the existing agreement, the New START treaty,” Putin said, adding, “But thus far there has been no answer to any of our…

Earlier Thursday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani revealed that a sanctions-happy Washington had slapped his country with over 90 sets of restrictions against the Iranian state, Iranian companies and Iranian nationals in the past year-and-a-half alone. The United States has imposed sanctions on two top judges on the Revolutionary Court, the Treasury Department said in a press release Thursday. According to the Treasury, the designations target Mohammad Moghisseh and Abolghasem Salavati, the heads of two branches of the Tehran Revolutionary Court. The judges have been added to the Treasury’s so-called ‘specially designated nationals and blocked persons list’, a listing comprising literally thousands of names and…

The move follows media reports that the majority of Lebanese lawmakers selected former education minister Diab as the candidate for the post of prime minister. Lebanon’s President Aoun has named former education minister Hassan Diab as the country’s next Prime Minister in a televised statement broadcast by Lebanese media. Aoun previously delayed a parliamentary session to appoint a new prime minister, just a week after consultations had to be similarly postponed in the wake of the withdrawal of businessman Samir Khatib from the race. Khatib had been touted as a likely candidate for the vacant position. Former Prime Minister Saad…

The latest US sanctions targeting Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which will deliver natural gas to Germany, will not stop the project, presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday. “We assume that [Nord Stream 2] will be completed,” he told journalists when asked whether Washington’s potential sanctions might result in construction being suspended. Peskov’s comments followed the approval of a bill by the US Senate, which would sanction companies involved in the construction of Nord Stream 2. It is expected to be signed by US President Donald Trump later this week. Pending White House approval, the companies working on the…

by Ron Paul “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan. We didn’t know what we were doing.” So said Gen. Douglas Lute, who oversaw the US war on Afghanistan under Presidents Bush and Obama. Eighteen years into the longest war in US history, we are finally finding out, thanks to thousands of pages of classified interviews on the war published by the Washington Post last week, that General Lute’s cluelessness was shared by virtually everyone involved in the war. What we learned in what is rightly being called the “Pentagon Papers” of our time, is that hundreds of…

In an 86-8 vote, the Senate passed a $738 billion military spending bill for 2020, sending it on to the president to sign. The bill includes substantial authorizations to purchase various warplanes and ships, and funding of nuclear weapons. The small increase in nuclear weapons spending comes without past House restrictions on low-yield weapons, These weapons are intended to be more usable than the existing arsenal, though raise criticism that it would make nuclear strikes far more common. The bill also establishes a Space Force, following Trump Administration calls for such a force to try to retain a US military superiority in space against largely undefined enemies.…

The Iraqi Foreign Ministry says a group of more than one hundred Turkish children, whose parents are being held in the Arab country for membership in the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group, are going to be repatriated from Baghdad later this month. The ministry’s spokesman, Ahmad al-Sahhaf, told the Arabic service of Russia’s Sputnik news agency on Wednesday that the repatriation of the 125 children will take place on December 26, stating that it is the result of coordination between the Iraqi Foreign Ministry, the Supreme Judicial Council and security authorities. Sahhaf noted that the forthcoming return will take the number of Daesh children repatriated to their respective countries…

Lebanon’s Caretaker Prime Minister Sa’ad al-Hariri has withdrawn his nomination for the premiership race, and stressed that the forthcoming parliamentary consultations to form a new cabinet “should not be postponed under any excuse.” “Ever since I tendered my resignation 50 days ago in response to the scream of the Lebanese, I have strenuously sought to fulfill their demand of forming a government of experts, which I believe that it alone can address the dangerous social and economic crisis that our country is facing,” Hariri said in a written statement released on Wednesday. “When I realized that the stances that surfaced…