Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Russia 's involvement in last year's White House race was no "act of war," former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden said Tuesday, discounting claims raised across Washington amid lingering accusations over Moscow's role in the 2016 U.S. presidential race. "I would never use that term," the retired four-star Air Force general told The Hill in an interview Tuesday, separating himself from a growing list of Democrats and Republicans who claim Russia committed an "act of war" by interfering in last year's presidential election.
Russia pushed back against demands that it abandon Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad over a chemical-weapons attack as the Kremlin said President Vladimir Putin is likely to meet with U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Putin complained that relations with the U.S. are worse than under President Barack Obama, while Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov criticized the Trump administration's "ambiguous and contradictory" foreign policy at the start of talks with Tillerson in Moscow Wednesday.
THE BIG STORY: The Hitler comparison offered up by White House press secretary Sean Spicer was a terrible analogy, phrased terribly, at a terribly inconvenient time. It's made worse by the casual relationship the Trump White House has had with facts, and with findings of U.S. intelligence agencies.
Last August, a handwritten ledger surfaced in Ukraine with dollar amounts and dates next to the name of Paul Manafort, who was then Donald Trump's campaign chairman.
President Trump did the right thing, the necessary thing, in striking Syria's Shayrat Air Base in response to the Assad regime's gruesome gas attack on civilians. In so doing, the president sharply reversed his own past stance and positions his team took just days ago on Syria.
Foreign ministers from the Group of Seven industrialized nations are exp... . US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson arrives the meeting of Foreign Ministers of the G7 countries in Lucca, Italy, Monday, April 10, 2017.
How else to explain a newly elected president looking the other way after an act of Russian aggression? Agreeing to a farcically one-sided nuclear deal? Mercilessly mocking the idea that Russia represents our foremost geopolitical foe? Accommodating the illicit nuclear ambitions of a Russian ally? Welcoming a Russian foothold in the Middle East? Refusing to provide arms to a sovereign country invaded by Russia? Diminishing our defenses and pursuing a Moscow-friendly policy of hostility to fossil fuels? All of these items, of course, refer to things said or done by President Barack Obama. To take them in order: He reset with Russia shortly after its clash with Georgia in 2008.
"What I've been looking at is, are you going to talk to us about no-fly zones, are you going to talk to us about safe zones" for civil war refugees, Donnelly said Monday during a visit to Fort Wayne.
Increasing tensions with Moscow over U.S. strikes on Syria have complicated the Democrats' argument that President Trump is too close to Russia, even as congressional committees continue to investigate Russian interference in the presidential election and any collusion with the Trump campaign. None of this is likely to lessen the vigor with which Democrats pursue the Russia probe.
At the risk of being accused of stating the obvious, the what-ifs of history become increasingly significant when considered in the context of globalization and power politics. One doesn't have to go back to the end of World War I when the mistakes were made in the Treaty of Versailles that led to the rise and ultimate devastation just 20 years later of Nazi Germany to realize that if the allied parties had been more generous in their victory settlement, Hitler and the Third Reich and World War II might have been avoided.
Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez raised alarm Monday over the potential Russian takeover of a large American-based oil firm that controls numerous terminals and infrastructure in the United States. "We can't play Russian roulette with national security and energy independence," the Democratic senator from New Jersey tweeted on Monday.
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson waits for the start of a meeting last month at NATO headquarters in Brussels. Tillerson is scheduled to travel to Russia on Tuesday, in what promises to be a difficult round of talks after the U.S. missile strike in Syria last week.
A sign seen at a #HandsOffSyria event in New York City on Friday, April 7. U.S. President Donald Trump claims the objective of his cruise missile strike on Syria is to deter Syrian President Bashar Assad from using chemical weapons again. But six years into Syria's brutal civil war, Trump does not have the luxury of defining his objective that narrowly.
"Putin views the USA strikes on Syria as aggression against a sovereign state in violation of the norms of worldwide law", Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for President Vladimir Putin, said in a statement disseminated by Russian state TV early Friday. Their compromise text would drop demands that Syria hand over information on its military operations on the day of the strike, replacing them with language from a previous resolution urging cooperation on chemical weapons investigations, diplomats said.
"We have to be vigilant", he said. Accordingly, accommodations had been made with Russian Federation - particularly in sharing air space - in order to promote USA -led coalition attacks against ISIS.
The United States vowed Friday to keep the pressure on Syria after the intense nighttime wave of missile strikes from U.S. ships, despite the prospect of escalating Russian ill will that could further inflame one of the world's most vexing conflicts. Standing firm, the Trump administration signaled new sanctions would soon follow the missile attack, and the Pentagon was even probing whether Russia itself was involved in the chemical weapons assault that compelled President Donald Trump to action.
The United States vowed Friday to keep the pressure on Syria after the intense nighttime wave of missile strikes from U.S. ships, despite the prospect of escalating Russian ill will that could further inflame one of the world's most vexing conflicts.
Trump basked in a chorus of support from U.S. lawmakers and from allies around the world, but Russia expressed anger. U.S. President Donald Trump and members of his staff receive a briefing on the Syria military strike at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., Thursday night.
The United States fired cruise missiles on Friday at a Syrian airbase from which it said a deadly chemical weapons attack had been launched this week, the first direct U.S. assault on the government of Bashar al-Assad in six years of civil war. U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the step his predecessor Barack Obama never took: directly targeting Assad's military with air strikes in punishment for the chemical weapons attack, which killed at least 70 people, many of them children.