On November 27, a powerful force led by Islamist group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) launched an offensive in northern Syria. Taking advantage of the dysfunctional Assad regime forces – the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) – and Russia’s preoccupation with its grinding war in Ukraine, HTS and its Turkish-supported allies advanced to the south – and swiftly took the city of Aleppo from Syrian strongman Bashar Al-Assad, his SAA and his Russian backers.

The Russians know Tartus is in trouble. On December 3, commercial satellite imagery revealed that every major Russian warship known to operate from Tartus – three missile frigates, a diesel-electric attack submarine and two lightly-armed support ships – had unmoored from the port’s three large piers and sailed into the Med.

Losing Tartus would be catastrophic for Russian power projection in Southern Europe and North Africa. Realistically, the only way for the Kremlin to replace the vital shore infrastructure in Tartus is to regain access to the Med via the Bosporus.

But there’s almost no prospect of that happening while the war in Ukraine still rages. Russian president Vladimir Putin may soon face an unhappy choice: keep fighting in Ukraine but lose influence in the Mediterranean region; or sue for peace in Ukraine and open up access from the Black Sea to the Med.

On November 30, Chinese social media posts showed what appeared to be half a dozen bodies left strewn across a busy road in Neijiang City in China’s Sichuan province, after another apparent attack using a car.

We will perhaps never know the truth of what happened, but since February, China has suffered one mass killing after another. In an especially horrific incident on the 11th of last month, a man drove his SUV on the exercise track of Zhuhai Stadium, killing 35 people and injuring 45 others. For decades, disaffected Chinese have resorted to violence as a first choice instead of the last one.

But the Communist Party’s reaction has been to censor news of incidents and prevent expressions of grief and mourning. These actions, by further bottling up emotions, are making a bad situation even worse.

CCP authorities are especially worried at the moment because the economy is suffering a prolonged downturn, the first since the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976.

Further, the gloom in Chinese society is forcing collapse of birth rates. “In this country, to love your child is to never let him be born in the first place,” has become a popular sentiment.

The Office of Management and Budget is a less well-known entity within the executive branch, but few are as critical for ensuring the implementation of the president’s agenda. President-elect Donald Trump has once again placed that awesome responsibility in Russ Vought’s hands.

OMB is not just the president’s budget division. While OMB oversees the structure and execution of the budget, it also has oversight powers over federal agencies and federal regulations to ensure the commands of the president, bestowed executive powers by the American people, are being followed.

In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Vought explained how OMB can use those powers to kill the deep state—a death by a thousand cuts.

Russia’s strategy in executing its aggressive war against Ukraine, passing the 1,000-day mark last week (11/19(, puts the country’s economy, society, and armed forces under enormous pressure that Moscow’s militaristic propaganda cannot quite cover.

Relentless attacks, necessary for proving Russia’s control of the strategic initiative, produce Russian casualties so heavy that recruitment based on outlandish payments cannot compensate for the number of losses ( Mediazona, November 22). Public support for the war cannot be measured with any accuracy, but opinion polls show a steady increase in preferences for immediate peace talks (Levada.ru, November 6; The Moscow Times, November 22).

For Putin, escalation is the only way to alter the pattern of fast-progressing attrition.

Weekly we read of thousands of illegal immigrants arriving from areas controlled by violent Mexican cartel gangs or failed, strife-torn South American countries that have emptied their jails to send their felons northwards. Hundreds of thousands of them have been committing violent crimes while demanding still more free housing and support from strapped American taxpayers.

Big-city left-wing mayors and city councils boast that they will do all their best to nullify federal immigration laws, even as their cities face near insolvency housing, feeding, and monitoring the influx. Virtue-signaling Democrat governors have so far not dared to utter a word of criticism about what has been the Biden administration’s truly historic “massive importation” of illegal aliens into the U.S. over the last four years.

Why?  Because they could.  Very soon they won’t be able to any longer.  Their war on legality and morality is about to end...