Tailors busy stitching Russian flags to meet rising demand in Bamako, the capital of Mali, December 26, 2021On Friday, Mali’s transitional government has clarified that it is engaged with Russian military trainers even as French troops are drawing down. So, it is official that Russian security personnel are deployed to Mali.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, left, visiting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow in 2019. (Kremlin)By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
Vladimir Putin was “defiant” during his end-of-year press conference last Thursday. The Russian president, who has held these impressive question-and-answer events for the past 20 years, was “bellicose.” He was “threatening.” So we read in the all-the-same-always American press.
By Pepe Escobar posted with permission and widely cross-posted
Coming straight from President Putin, it did sound like a bolt from the sky:
“We need long-term legally binding guarantees even if we know they cannot be trusted, as the U.S. frequently withdraws from treaties that become uninteresting to them. But it’s something, not just verbal assurances.”
And that’s how Russia-U.S. relations come to the definitive crunch – after an interminable series of polite red alerts coming from Moscow.
The latest unbiased facts on covid vaccine safety and effectiveness.
Please note: No medical advice; patients are asked to consult a doctor.
By Crofton Black: Need to verify your identity on a phone? Reset a password? Log in to a sensitive site or account? You’ll probably get a text message to check who you are. But it won’t come directly from your account provider. Instead, it will come via one or more middlemen: little-known bulk messaging companies that use the access they’ve brokered to hundreds of phone networks to send millions of messages cheaply and quickly around the world.
The New Dark Age 