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Trump slams outgoing CIA director Brennan after criticism over Russia threat | Fox News

President-elect Donald Trump blasted outgoing CIA Director John Brennan on social media Sunday after Brennan said Trump does not have a “full understanding” of Russia’s power and threat to the world.

“I don’t think he has a full understanding of Russian capabilities and the actions they are taking on the world,” Brennan told “Fox News Sunday.”

Mr. Trump has made similar comments before. But the fact that he made them in a joint interview with two European publications — The Times of London and Bild, a German newspaper — and did so days before assuming the presidency alarmed European diplomats.

“They have sanctions on Russia — let’s see if we can make some good deals with Russia,”

Mr. Trump was critical of Russia’s military intervention in Syria, including airstrikes in Aleppo that American officials say have hit hospitals and killed civilians, saying it had led to a “terrible humanitarian situation.”

Iran’s president said on Tuesday that he simply would not allow President-elect Donald J. Trump to tear up last year’s nuclear agreement and warned of unspecified consequences if he did.

During the campaign, Mr. Trump called the nuclear agreement “a bad deal” that he promised to “tear up.”

As Mr. Rouhani posed the question, the audience began chanting, “Death to America.”

A new book by General Sir Richard Shirreff, NATO's deputy supreme allied commander for Europe between 2011 and 2014, evokes a potential scenario that leads to a devastating future war with Russia.

In his account, Russia rapidly expands its war aims by invading the Baltic States, which are NATO members, and world war ensues.

The latter, written at the height of the Cold War, was conceived as a "future history," supposedly looking back at the outbreak and subsequent unfolding of a full-blown NATO vs Warsaw Pact war.

Xi Jinping, China’s President, Unexpectedly Meets With North Korean Envoy

what appeared to be a slight thaw in a bilateral relationship that has been strained by Beijing’s concerns about the North’s nuclear weapons program.

Mr. Ri, a former foreign minister and a confidant of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, told Chinese Communist Party officials on Tuesday that his country would continue to expand its nuclear arsenal and had no intention of giving up the weapon

while Bush and Blair continue to have their strong detractors – most recently in Bush’s case, Donald Trump – they have remained honored public servants enjoying lucrative perks and pensions. Shouldn’t there have been some official consequences for their having misled their publics about whether the country needed to go to war?

In my opinion, American presidents should not be jailed for poorly executing a war — by that standard, James Madison might have spent his last years in a cell — but what needs to be considered is whether chiefs of state in democracies should be officially punished for undermining the process by which a major decision, like whether to go to war, is made.

There needs to be some kind of sanction that will give the next president and prime minister a second or third thought before he starts exaggerating the danger that the U.S. or the UK faces from an adversary.

That's the promise of the Paris Agreement on climate change, which 132 countries, including the United States, have ratified or accepted, pledging to make the air less deadly and to prevent the most catastrophic consequences of global warming

he United States could not actually nullify the global agreement on its own, and withdrawing from the agreement would take one to four years, depending on the approach. But that may not matter much. The White House says it wants to revive coal, oil and natural gas production, all of which pollute the atmosphere, contributing to the likelihood of mass extinction, worsening droughts, deadlier heat waves, flooded coastal cities and other climate disasters.

Because the Paris Agreement does not levy sanctions or fines against countries that fail to meet their pollution-reduction pledges, it's possible the Trump administration could choose to remain in the agreement while basically polluting as usual.Either tactic -- defection or de facto not caring -- could weaken the pact, potentially leading other nations to defect. The United States, after all, is the second biggest annual climate polluter, after China, and helped negotiate the Paris deal.

Police decided the swastikas didn’t constitute hate crimes, and school officials said they punished students who were involved

Teachers asked administrators to send a letter home to parents explaining the situation, according to The Boston Globe. That didn’t happen, the Globe reported, and students and some teachers began talking about it. 

One teacher broached the subject in her classroom. Another raised the topic of anti-Semitism with fellow teachers, and privately with a student. Both were sanctioned with disciplinary letters.

Why Nobody Cares the President Is Lying

On his first full day in office Mr. Trump insisted that his inaugural crowd was the largest ever, a baseless boast that will likely set a pattern for his relationship both to the media and to the truth.

For years, as a conservative radio talk show host, I played a role in that conditioning by hammering the mainstream media for its bias and double standards. But the price turned out to be far higher than I imagined. The cumulative effect of the attacks was to delegitimize those outlets and essentially destroy much of the right’s immunity to false information. We thought we were creating a savvier, more skeptical audience. Instead, we opened the door for President Trump, who found an audience that could be easily misled.

Many staff members believe that the paper’s top editor, Gerard Baker, previously a feisty conservative commentator, is trying to Murdoch-ize the paper. “There is a systemic issue,” one reporter told me. The dissatisfaction went public last week, with stories in Politico and the Huffington Post.

As a longtime reader, admirer and competitor of The Journal, I think the internal critics are right. You can see the news pages becoming more politicized. You can also see The Journal’s staff pushing back, through both great journalism (including exposes on the Trump administration) and quiet insubordination.

One way to understand the fight is through the lens of Fox News. Its former leader, Roger Ailes, knew that the country had become more polarized and that many viewers didn’t want sober objectivity. He also knew that most reporters leaned left, and their beliefs sometimes seeped into coverage.

Flynn’s maladroitness in fact is the one thing that may have saved the administration from an even worse scandal: His reported lie was exposed so quickly that the uproar will thwart any project to lift early the sanctions on Russia for its role in the 2016 election. He has given the Trump administration an opportunity to localize what is really a much larger scandal.

They can now try to load all the blame for all the various sinister connections between the Trump campaign and Russian spy agencies onto one man, in an effort to protect everybody else implicated in the scandal, including the president himself.

Revelations that top officials are targeting people to be assassinated abroad, including American citizens, are only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far our nation’s violation of human rights has extended. This development began after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has been sanctioned and escalated by bipartisan executive and legislative actions, without dissent from the general public. As a result, our country can no longer speak with moral authority on these critical issues.

With leadership from the United States, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948 as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” This was a bold and clear commitment that power would no longer serve as a cover to oppress or injure people, and it established equal rights of all people to life, liberty, security of person, equal protection of the law and freedom from torture, arbitrary detention or forced exile.

The declaration has been invoked by human rights activists and the international community to replace most of the world’s dictatorships with democracies and to promote the rule of law in domestic and global affairs. It is disturbing that, instead of strengthening these principles, our government’s counterterrorism policies are now clearly violating at least 10 of the declaration’s 30 articles, including the prohibition against “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

According to Friedman, the big challenge we face in the Arab and Islamic world is "the Narrative" -- his patronizing term for Muslim views about America's supposedly negative role in the region. If Muslims weren't so irrational, he thinks, they would recognize that "U.S. foreign policy has been largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims or trying to help free them from tyranny."

one of the other participants (a prominent English journalist) put it quite simply. "If the United States wants to improve its image in the Islamic world," he said, "it should stop killing Muslims."

How many Muslims has the United States killed in the past thirty years, and how many Americans have been killed by Muslims? Coming up with a precise answer to this question is probably impossible, but it is also not necessary, because the rough numbers are so clearly lopsided.

his most influential theory holds that when the police emphasize the maintenance of order rather than the piecemeal pursuit of rapists, murderers and carjackers, concentrating on less threatening though often illegal disturbances in the fabric of urban life like street-corner drug-dealing, graffiti and subway turnstile-jumping, the rate of more serious crime goes down.

The approach is psychologically based. It proceeds from the presumption, supported by research, that residents’ perceptions of the safety of their neighborhood is based not on whether there is a high rate of crime, but on whether the neighborhood appears to be well tended — that is, whether its residents hold it in mutual regard, uphold the locally accepted obligations of civility, and outwardly disdain the flouting of those obligations.

acts of criminality are fostered by such an “untended” environment, and that the solution is thus to tend it by being intolerant of the smallest illegalities. The wish “to ‘decriminalize’ disreputable behavior that ‘harms no one’ — and thus remove the ultimate sanction the police can employ to maintain neighborhood order — is, we think, a mistake,” Mr. Wilson and Mr. Kelling wrote. “Arresting a single drunk or a single vagrant who has harmed no identifiable person seems unjust, and in a sense it is. But failing to do anything about a score of drunks or a hundred vagrants may destroy an entire community.”

Hiroshima is a book about what happened in Japan, to Japan, in August 1945. It is a book about five Japanese and one German hibakusha, or bomb survivors. It is not a book which concerns itself with what the bombing meant for America in military terms, but rather what it meant for the people of Hiroshima in the most human terms.

Inevitably, it also contains within it two Americas. One is the America which develops and uses—not once, but twice—a weapon of a destructive capability which far outstrips anything that has come before, the America which decides what price some other country’s civilian population must pay for its victory. There is nothing particular to America in this—all nations in war behave in much the same way. But in the years between the bombing of Hiroshima and now, no nation has intervened militarily with as many different countries as America, and always on the other country’s soil; which is to say, no nation has treated as many other civilian populations as collateral damage as America while its own civilians stay well out of the arena of war. So that’s one of the Americas in Hiroshima—the America of brutal military power.

But there’s another America in the book, that of John Hersey. The America of looking at the destruction your nation has inflicted and telling it like it is. The America of stepping back and allowing someone else to tell their story through you because they have borne the tragedy and you have the power to bear witness to it. It is the America of The New Yorker of William Shawn, which, for the only time in its history, gave over an entire edition to a single article and kept its pages clear of its famed cartoons. It is the America which honored Hersey for his truth telling.

pay a fine next week

military weapons from Cuba onboard

Chong Chon Gang

Iran began suspending most advanced uranium-fuel enrichment and halted other sensitive elements of its nuclear program. In exchange, it received what the United States called “limited, targeted and reversible sanctions relief for a six-month period.”

The goal is to resolve peacefully the longstanding dispute over Iran’s contentious nuclear energy program, which Iran has called peaceful and legal but the Western countries and Israel have described as a guise to achieve the ability to produce nuclear weapons.

suspending the production of 20 percent-enriched uranium, which is a few technical steps short of weapons-grade, disabling thousands of centrifuges used to make that fuel,

Iran is facing a water shortage potentially so serious that officials are making contingency plans for rationing in the greater Tehran area, home to 22 million, and other major cities around the country. President Hassan Rouhani has identified water as a national security issue, and in public speeches in areas struck hardest by the shortage he is promising to “bring the water back.”

Iran’s water troubles extend far beyond Lake Urmia, which as a salt lake was never fit for drinking or agricultural use. Other lakes and major rivers have also been drying up, leading to disputes over water rights, demonstrations and even riots.

Dam construction was given renewed emphasis under Mr. Rouhani’s predecessor as president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who as an engineer had a weakness for grand projects. Another driving force is the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which through its engineering arm, Khatam al-Anbia Construction, builds many of the dams in Iran and surrounding countries.