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The US has attempted to direct attention away from the fact supposed “moderate rebels” it has been supporting are now openly aligned to designated foreign terrorist organizations including Al Qaeda, Jabhat Al Nusra, and the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” (ISIS) by focusing instead on the alleged “humanitarian crisis” unfolding amid final operations to restore security to the northern Syrian city of Aleppo.

Reuters in an article titled, “Russia urges U.S. to deliver on promise to separate Syria’s moderates from ‘terrorists’,” would admit: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov urged U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday to make good on U.S. pledges to separate Washington-oriented units of Syrian opposition from “terrorist groups”, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday. In response, Washington has incoherently and dishonestly blamed Russia for what it calls the driving of moderates into the arms of terrorist organizations.

However, in reality, a long-standing truth entirely negates America’s current rhetoric – so thoroughly that this reality lays the blame for the last five years of regional catastrophe entirely at Washington’s feet.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Americans' confidence in Congress as an institution is down to 10%, ranking the legislative body last on a list of 16 societal institutions for the fourth straight year. This is the lowest level of confidence Gallup has found, not only for Congress, but for any institution on record. Americans remain most confident in the military, at 76%.

The mindlessness is unbearable. Amnesty International tells us that we must “fight the Muslim ban” because Trump’s bigotry is wrecking lives. Anthony Dimaggio at CounterPunch says Trump should be impeached because his Islamophobia is a threat to the Constitution. This is not to single out these two as the mindlessness is everywhere among those whose worldview is defined by Identity Politics. One might think that Amnesty International should be fighting against the Bush/Cheney/Obama regime wars that have produced the refugees by killing and displacing millions of Muslims. For example, the ongoing war that Obama inflicted on Yemen results in the death of one Yemeni child every 10 minutes, according to UNICEF. Where is Amnesty International? Clearly America’s wars on Muslims wreck far more lives than Trump’s ban on immigrants. Why the focus on an immigration ban and not on wars that produce refugees? Is it because Obama is responsible for war and Trump for the ban? Is the liberal/progressive/left projecting Obama’s monstrous crimes onto Trump? Is it that we must hate Trump and not Obama?

ormer prime minister Ehud Barak said on Friday the current governing coalition led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "is exhibiting signs of fascism."In an interview with Channel 10, Barak offered withering criticism of Netanyahu's decision to appoint Avigdor Liberman as defense minister in place of Moshe Ya'alon as part of a gambit to expand his coalition and solidify his hold on power.Ya'alon resigned from the government on Friday, even as Netanyahu tried to compensate him by offering him the job of foreign minister.

A coalition of US groups representing more than 10 million scientists and engineers published 20 questions on Wednesday they want every US presidential candidate to answer ahead of November’s vote. The questions range from how to support vaccine science, to defining the scope of America’s goals in space, to the candidates’ views on climate change and what would they would do about it. Stances on nuclear power, protecting the world’s oceans, reducing the human and economic costs of mental illness, and the controversy over visa programs that allow highly skilled immigrants into the United States also feature in the list, made public by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

The full list is available at ScienceDebate.org/20qs. The 56 groups that helped create the list by crowd sourcing the questions has asked for the candidates to answer the questions by September 6. All are described by AAAS as non-partisan groups, including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Geophysical Union, the American Chemical Society and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Recent debate over U.S. government surveillance has focused on the information that American technology companies secretly provide to the National Security Agency. But that is only one of the ways the NSA eavesdrops on international communications. A classified NSA slide obtained by The Washington Post lists “Two Types of Collection.”

The U.S. government has never publicly acknowledged killing Ghul. But documents provided to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden confirm his demise in October 2012 and reveal the agency’s extensive involvement in the targeted killing program that has served as a centerpiece of President Obama’s counterterrorism strategy.

Ecuador has called for the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to leave the country by the end of September. In a letter obtained by the Associated Press on Thursday, Ecuador’s government told the USAID that it “must not execute any new activity,” nor widen any existing projects in the country. The letter, dated November 26, 2013, was signed by Gabriela Rosero of Ecuador’s international cooperation agency and was sent to the US Embassy in the Ecuadorean capital of Quito. The letter was reportedly addressed to USAID program officer, Christopher M. Cushing. Rosero said that the USAID must pull out by September 30, and that “the decision has been made.” Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa suggested in December that the USAID's programs were no longer welcome in Ecuador, saying on one of his regular Saturday programs on television and radio that "we don't need charity."

In April, Ecuador ordered 20 US military staff working at the US Embassy in Quito to leave the country by the end of the month. In January, President Rafael Correa publicly complained that the United States had too many military officers in the country. He said Ecuador planned to order some to leave. Many observers say that the action was taken over concerns about Washington’s espionage activities. Relations between the United States and Ecuador have strained in recent years. There were even tense relations before President Correa granted political asylum to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in June 2012 in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald is once again rejecting claims that he and National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden are endangering American efforts to fight terrorism — and he’s using recent reports that the NSA might have spied on German Chancellor Angela Merkel to prove his point.“What we revealed is that this spying system is devoted not to terrorists, but is directed to innocent people around the world,” Greenwald told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an interview that aired Monday. “None of this has anything to do with terrorism. Is Angela Merkel a terrorist?”

“This is clearly about political power and economic espionage. And the claim that this is all about terrorism is seen around the world as what it is, which is pure deceit,” he added.

Greenwald insisted that his reporting and Snowden’s leaks are exposing the unnecessary expansiveness of the NSA spying program. “Every terrorist who is capable of tying their own shoes has long known that the U.S. government and the U.K. government are trying to monitor their communications in every way that they can,” Greenwald said. “That isn’t new. We didn’t reveal anything to terrorists that they didn’t already know.” Amanpour’s full interview with Greenwald will air Monday evening on CNN.

But others within the administration, and many outside experts, are increasingly worried that if President Obama does not take decisive action — such as quickly moving to claim the airspace over northwestern Syria and the Turkish border, where Russian jets are already operating — it is the United States that will suffer significant damage to both its reputation and its foreign policy and counterterrorism goals. Putin has said he does not intend to launch military ground operations in Syria, and senior administration officials said Wednesday that they see no evidence of any ground combat units there. But the Russian deployments include sophisticated electronics, some of them designed to jam aviation electronics. Other than Russia and the Syrian government, only the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State is flying planes in Syria.

The current internal administration debate is largely the same one that has kept the administration out of significant intervention in Syria’s civil war for the past four years. On one side, Russia’s involvement has strengthened the winning argument that the United States should avoid direct involvement in yet another Middle East conflict and should continue directing its resources toward countering forces such as the Islamic State that pose a direct threat to U.S. national security.

 Saudi Arabia is once again in the center of international events. The international community is primarily interested in consequences of Saudis’ adopting the decision to maintain the capacity of produced crude oil at the same level and to lower prices for its oil. There are various comments on this topic: ranging from conspiracy (the one about international conspiracy) to a detailed analysis of the international economy and the world oil market.

It is "quite natural" that business circles in both Russia and Egypt have raised the issue of the advisability of using their respective national currencies for bilateral payments, Russian President Vladimir Putin has told the Egyptian daily newspaper Al-Ahram.The President added that Russia already uses national currencies for trade with a number of CIS states, as well as China.“This practice proves its worth; we are ready to adopt it in our relations with Egypt as well. This issue is being discussed in detail by the relevant agencies of both countries,” Putin told Al-Ahram.

The lack of accurate information about police-involved shootings is roiling the nation’s law enforcement community, leaving officials unable to say whether high-profile killings are isolated events or part of an alarming trend, FBI Director James B. Comey said Wednesday. Speaking to a private gathering of more than 100 politicians and top law enforcement officials, Comey expressed frustration that the federal government has no better data on police shootings than databases assembled this year by The Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper. “It is unacceptable that The Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper from the U.K. are becoming the lead source of information about violent encounters between police and civilians. That is not good for anybody,” he said.

The reason: a dramatic improvement in analytics, cloud computing and ‘deep learning.’