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In Italy, China is no longer thought of as the origin of COVID-19, but as a friend in a time of dire need.Medics and paramedics from China salute as the board a Red Cross vehicle upon arrival at the Malpensa airport of Milan, March 18, 2020. Italy has been an alluring geopolitical prize throughout the ages because of its strategic location in the middle of the Mediterranean, its wealth, and the useful skills of its people. Now it’s the turn of today’s rising power, China, to seek to extend its influence there. Last year, Italy signed a Memorandum of Understanding...

It was quiet in eastern Ukraine last Wednesday. Indeed, it was another quiet day in an extended stretch of relative calm. The battles between the Ukrainian army and the pro-Russian separatists had largely stopped and heavy weaponry was being withdrawn. The Minsk cease-fire wasn't holding perfectly, but it was holding. On that same day, General Philip Breedlove, the top NATO commander in Europe, stepped before the press in Washington. Putin, the 59-year-old said, had once again "upped the ante" in eastern Ukraine -- with "well over a thousand combat vehicles, Russian combat forces, some of their most sophisticated air defense,...

<p>WASHINGTON -- Wesley Clark, the retired four-star general who is running for president, got himself in hot water with his Pentagon bosses more than once in his 34-year military career.</p> <p>Clark matter-of-factly recounts when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff grumbled that Clark had "one foot on a banana peel and one foot in the grave." Less than a year later, Clark was yanked out of his job as NATO's supreme allied commander.</p>

Welcome back, Tucker. Really. When Carlson was away, guest host David Shuster sullied Tucker's name-sake show with the tasteless "gotcha" game he sprung on Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), then compounded matters by leading a liberal love-in. Tucker's been back in the saddle for a couple days, and this evening took on Wesley Clark and later a representative of Media Matters. Speaking with Paul Waldman, Senior Fellow and Director of Special Projects of "Media Matters," Carlson displayed the graphic shown here, in which Hillary Clinton stated that she had "helped start" Media Matters. Under close questioning by Carlson, Waldman wound up...

On the third anniversary of the Benghazi terrorist attack, emails reviewed by Fox News raise significant questions about US government support for the secret shipment of weapons to the Libyan opposition.During the Spring of 2011, as the Obama administration ramped up efforts to topple the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, a licensed American arms dealer, Marc Turi, his business partner formerly with the CIA, senior US military officials in Europe and Africa as well as a former staffer for republican Senator John McCain considered logistics for arming the rebels, according to the emails exclusively obtained by Fox Business and Fox News....

STUTTGART, Germany -- When Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld wanted to shake up America's armed forces in Europe, he called in a Marine. Rumsfeld was assembling a team of commanding officers to carry out his plans for a military overhaul last year, and asked General James L. Jones, then commandant of the Marine Corps, to draw up a list of candidates for several top posts. Jones, who had been planning to retire in June, dutifully presented his recommendations and figured that was that. Rumsfeld then stunned him by asking whether he wanted one of the top jobs himself: commander of...

Democracy Now! Exclusive: Wesley Clark Admits Targeting Civilians In YugoslaviaIn a Democracy Now! exclusive, General Wesley Clark responds for the first time to in-depth questions about his targeting of civilian infrastructure in Yugoslavia, his bombing of Radio Television Serbia, the use of cluster bombs and depleted uranium, the speeding-up of the cockpit video of a bombing of a passenger train to make it appear as though it was an accident and other decisions he made and orders he gave as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander. Click here to read transcript of Jeremy Scahill questioning General Wesley Clark Since the 1999 bombing...

Democratic presidential hopeful Gen. Wesley Clark has repeatedly blamed President Bush for not protecting America from the 9/11 attacks, regularly invoking Harry Truman's Oval Office motto, "The buck stops here." But when it comes to intelligence gathered during the Clinton administration on the threat posed by Osama bin Laden, the then-Supreme Commander of NATO said Sunday that it just wasn't his job to intervene. Clark passed the buck in bin Laden during the following exchange with NBC "Meet the Press" host Tim Russert: RUSSERT: When you were Supreme NATO Commander were you aware of Osama bin Laden [and] al Qaeda?...

Following is quoted the middle of the entire report. Note: Detailed planning for the Kosovo campaign was ordered by Clinton in Mid-1998, the campaign itself started in March 1999, immediately after Clinton's impeachment, and slightly before Hillary began her NY Senate campaign. Reference numbers in the text are to footnotes in the orginal Army War College report. The Views of General Wesley Clark, Supreme Allied Commander, NATO It is important to note that this analysis is simply an attempt to express the concern generated by sets of figures that do not correspond to one another. It is not an attempt...

Ex-Military Leaders Speak of Clark Flaws Sat Oct 11, 1:36 PM ET By NANCY BENAC, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON - Wesley Clark, the retired four-star general who is running for president, got himself in hot water with his Pentagon bosses more than once in his 34-year military career. Clark matter-of-factly recounts a time when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was so irked he grumbled that Clark had "one foot on a banana peel and one foot in the grave." As it turned out, less than a year later Clark was yanked out of his job as NATO's...

SOME FACTS ABOUT GENERAL CLARK       General Wesley Clark.  A hero.  Medal winner.  A born leader.  The man that has GW Bush ready to just give up and quit.  Really?  Not everyone thinks so.  Take, for instance,  General Sir Mike Jackson, commander of the international K-For peacekeeping force.  "I'm not going to start the third world war for you."  It seems Clark had given an order to send in troops to attack Russian troops who were in the process of taking over the airfield of Kosovo's provincial capital.  Fighting  and killing Russian troops was not part of the war plan to...

WASHINGTON, OCT. 2 — You can tell a lot about a politician by the way he handles a crisis. Retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark, the newest Democratic presidential hopeful, confronted his most important challenge in 1999, when he was the senior commander of NATO and the alliance went to war to stop Slobodan Milosevic from repressing the ethnic Albanian population in Kosovo. It is no secret that General Clark's relationship with the Pentagon was strained during that conflict. So it is also not surprising that reporters have begun to mine that period for the sort of score-settling anecdotes that often...

When the order was given for American military personnel to attack Yugoslavia, it was not issued following a declaration of war from Congress. Nor was the order given by the President as a means of repelling a sudden attack on America by a foreign aggressor, or as a measure intended to rescue Americans abroad from unexpected peril. In fact, the order to attack Yugoslavia didn’t even follow the pattern set in Korea and Vietnam, in which our nation was committed to protracted foreign wars through unilateral presidential action. On March 23rd, the order to commence hostilities was given to an...

Sunday, Sep. 21, 2003The General Jumps In Wes Clark has launched a presidential bid that has a four-star luster. But is the antiwar general prepared for this kind of battle? ByKAREN TUMULTY Wesley Clark was top of his class at West Point, a Rhodes scholar, a decorated four-star general and the man who humbled Slobodan Milosevic when Clark was Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. But if he made any impression at all on many Americans, it happened after he retired and found stardom on cnn as one of the smoothest and most antiwar of the corps of generals turned...

September 16, 2003 The possibility that former NATO supreme commander Wesley Clark might enter the race for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination has been the subject of furious speculation in the media. But while recent coverage of Clark often claims that he opposed the war with Iraq, the various opinions he has expressed on the issue suggest the media's "anti-war" label is inaccurate. Many media accounts state that Clark, who led the 1999 NATO campaign against Yugoslavia, was outspoken in his opposition to the invasion of Iraq. The Boston Globe (9/14/03) noted that Clark is "a former NATO commander who...

Wesley Clark: General IssuesBy Lowell PonteFrontPageMagazine.com | August 25, 2003                                      PONTEFICATIONS"THE GUY MUST HAVE A BEDROOM AT CNN,” my wife would joke.  It seemed true, because at every hour of the day or night during the Iraq War, retired General Wesley K. Clark could be seen on the Cable News Network as a “military expert” criticizing the Bush Administration. A quick victory in Iraq “was not going to happen,” he told viewers on March 25, shortly  before the quickest blitzkrieg victory of its size in military history occurred.  But his words doubtless brought comfort to the fans of...

<p>"Organizational issues tend not to have a great deal of interest broadly out in the public." Even so, Rumsfeld said, "They can make an enormous amount of difference internally."</p> <p>Amen. One such "organizational issue" has sandbagged the Army.</p> <p>The next SACEUR - the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe - will be Marine Gen. James Jones, a Kansas City native. He'll replace Air Force Gen. Joseph Ralston, who got the job in 1999.</p>