Tag Archives: WorldNews

Pompeo says killing of Suleimani is part of ‘bigger strategy’ to deter US foes

Mafia USA? No Way!

‘Real deterrence’ strategy – which also apply to Russia and China – is at odds with earlier assertion that general was killed due to imminent threat to US

Qassem Suleimani was killed as part of a broader strategy of deterring challenges by US foes that also applies to China and Russia, the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, has said, further diluting the assertion that the senior Iranian general was targeted because he was plotting imminent attacks on US assets.

In his speech at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, Pompeo made no mention of the threat of imminent attacks planned by Suleimani. It only was in response to a question that he repeated his earlier assertion that pre-empting such plots was the reason for the 3 January US drone strike on Iran’s second most powerful official.

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Britain must prepare to fight wars without US help, says defence secretary

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Ben Wallace says US withdrawal from international leadership under Donald Trump ‘keeps me awake at night’

Britain must be prepared to fight future wars without the US as its principal ally, the defence secretary, Ben Wallace, has said.

Wallace said the increasing withdrawal of America from international leadership under Donald Trump meant Britain needed to rethink the assumptions underpinning its defence planning for the past decade.

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If you thought this was the decade Facebook would stop elevating rightwing demagogues, think again

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Mark Zuckerberg’s new year’s resolutions show Facebook has no plans to change its ways. At least the lip service is over

In Silicon Valley, the first week of January is reliably bookmarked by two news stories: the latest absurd and amusing products at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement of his New Year’s resolution, which he annoyingly persists in calling “personal challenges”.

Zuckerberg’s resolutions have evolved in tandem with Facebook itself, from the domestic and human-sized (go running, eat less meat) to the global and unwieldy (“fixing” Facebook). So it seems worth noting that 2020 is apparently the year that Zuckerberg is officially giving up.

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US is not willing to withdraw troops from Iraq, says Pompeo

If they say go – we gotta go and leave.

Secretary of state says US is only willing to discuss future structure of forces in country

Washington is not willing to bow to Iraqi demands to withdraw its troops and any future discussions with Baghdad will be purely confined to the future structure of its forces in the country, the US state department has said.

The recommitment to US troops in Iraq defies an Iraqi parliament vote last week demanding all US forces leave in the wake of the killing of the Iranian general Qassem Suleimani by a drone strike in Baghdad. The US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, said the US was only willing to discuss force reconfiguration with the Iraqis, and a greater contribution by Nato forces.

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