1. North Korea:
2. Turkey:
This is much more important and sinister than its title implies.
3. Russia: President Putin asks 755 US diplomats to leave Russia
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Sunday that 755 US diplomats must leave his country, after Moscow announced it would expel American staff in retaliation for tough new sanctions from Washington.
The Russian foreign ministry had earlier demanded the US cut its diplomatic presence in Russia by September to 455 — the same number Moscow has in the US.
“More than a thousand people were working and are still working” at the US embassy and consulates, Putin said in an interview with Rossia-24 television. “755 people must stop their activities in Russia.”
The Russian President also said there would be no improvement in ties with the US anytime soon.
Tehran (AFP) – A defiant Iran vowed on Saturday to press ahead with its missile programme and condemned new US sanctions, as tensions rise after the West hardened its tone against the Islamic republic.
In the latest incident, Tehran and Washington accused each other’s naval forces of provocative manoeuvres in the Gulf that culminated in a US helicopter firing warning flares.
The US Navy said it had reacted to unresponsive vessels belonging to the Revolutionary Guards closing in on American ships at high speed, a charge denied by Iran which described the American move as unprovoked.
5. Venezuela: Deadly protests mar Venezuela ballot as voters snub Maduro assembly
CARACAS/SAN CRISTOBAL, Venezuela, (Reuters) – Deadly protests rocked Venezuela on Sunday as voters broadly boycotted an election for a constitutional super-body that unpopular leftist President Nicolas Maduro vowed would begin a “new era of combat” in the crisis-stricken nation.
Anti-Maduro activists wearing hoods or masks erected barricades on roads, and scuffles broke out with security forces who moved in quickly to disperse demonstrators who denounced the election as a naked power grab by the president.
Authorities said seven people were killed in the confrontations. The opposition said the true death toll was around 12, which would make Sunday one of the deadliest days since massive and sustained protests started in early April.
Also this:
I will add more to this post over the next couple of hours. Its more important to get this posted now rather than make it complete. Which is impossible anyway.
Thank you all for sending this material in. Please keep watching these stories and please keep sending in updates, either to the Reader’s links posts or to this one here.
I can never seem to get a handle on why we are all supposed to hate the Russians so much. They call Putin a “murderer” and a dictator, but didn’t Hillary Clinton murder the president of Libya and hand his country over to the Jihadists? Wasn’t Obama personally picking victims off with drone attacks? Why are we supposed to believe that the Russians are a worse kind of terrible than we are?
I thought Donald Trump was going to usher in a new era of intelligence, but that’s not how it’s going at all. I thought we were going to see the two great powers join together to fight Islamic terrorism, but that’s not going to happen now. Now it looks like a decade of hostility is about to begin and I just don’t think that’s necessary. What are these sanctions going to achieve other than loss of income for lots of people and a lot of ill-will all around. Fucking brilliant!
” Russia: President Putin asks 755 US diplomats to leave Russia”
I guess the CIA is in trouble, at least for 754 “new employee”, they have to find seats in their office building…
Ukraine’s shady dealings paid off, they hated Trump and Russia equally, they managed to compromise any possibility of normalized relationship by heating up the fake “collusion” scandal and thus Trump didn’t dare to reset the (already unnecessarily) strained relationship with a potential ally against snackbaring barbarians at the gate of western civilization. Russia has now been alienated to the degree that, not trusting the West anymore, they will seek even more to find allegiances elsewhere, including dealing more with China and Iran and whoever else is willing to take them seriously. And so the western world keeps going on its suicidal path even farther. It frustrates me to no end that even the supposedly smart people like Mark Levin do not understand the geopolitics and are blinded by the cold war ideas, taking some questionable things as axioms (“Putin is a bloody dictator, a murderous thug!”) and supporting the stupid sanctions. Wacky continuation of nobama’s policy towards keeping the anti-Russian sentiment in easily scared small eastern-european countries like Poland or Estonia, just makes no sense.