Syrian President Bashar al-Assad says he will be remembered in history as a ruler who defended the territorial integrity of his country in the face of foreign-sponsored militancy. “I hope that history will see me as the man who protected his country, from the terrorism and from the intervention, and saved its sovereignty,” he told NBC News television network in an exclusive interview to be broadcast on Thursday. He added, “When you protect your country from the terrorists, and you kill terrorists, and you defeat terrorists, you’re not brutal. You are a patriot.”

Syria has been gripped by foreign-backed militancy since March 2011. UN special envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura estimates that over 400,000 people have been killed in the conflict. The UN has stopped its official casualty count in Syria, citing its inability to verify the figures it receives from various sources. While most European countries have been voicing opposition to the government of President Assad, some of them are gradually making a shift in their policies as they realize the importance of Damascus’ efforts in fighting terrorism.

No Putin proposition of transition 

In the interview, Assad also said Russian President Vladimir Putin has never talked to him about leaving power, despite pressure from Washington for the Syrian president to step down. “They never said a single word regarding this,” Assad said when asked whether Putin or Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had talked to him about a political transition in Syria.

Assad also said he is not concerned that Putin and US Secretary of State John Kerry, who travels to Moscow Thursday, will make a deal that would force him from power. “Because their politics, I mean, the Russian politics, is not based on making deals. It’s based on values,” Assad said. Kerry is heading on Thursday for his third visit to Moscow this year to resume Syria peace talks.

Despite appearing increasingly at odds over the way forward, Russia and the US are nominally co-chairs of international efforts to end the conflict in Syria. Foreign-backed militant groups abandoned the last UN-brokered talks in Geneva in April after declaring a new war against the Syrian government.

US foreign policy

The Syrian president further played down the lack of foreign policy experience of presumptive US Republican nominee Donald Trump, stating that neither the incumbent US President Barack Obama nor his predecessors George W. Bush and Bill Clinton had such a capability.

“Who had this experience before? Obama? Or George Bush? Or Clinton before? None of them had any experience,” he said. “This is the problem with the United States. You have to look for a statesman who has real experience in politics for years. Not because, to have position in Congress for few years, or minister of foreign affairs, for example, that doesn’t help you have the experience,” Assad pointed out.

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US President Obama has accepted the letter of accreditation from Ambassador Etoundi Essomba. The Minister Plenipotentiary officially took office on the 27^th of June 2016 as Cameroon ambassador to the USA after the traditional ceremony of presentation of credentials that held at the Oval Office of the White House.

Etoundi Essomba who served as Cameroon ambassador to Israel for two decades was appointed to US by a presidential decree on Monday, April 11, 2016.  The Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador of the Republic of Cameroon to the United States of America with residence in Washington DC now has the onerous task of uniting the US Cameroonian Diaspora and defend the interest of Cameroon. He replaced his kinsman, Charles Foe Atangana.

Chi Prudence Asong (Cameroon Concord News Group)

Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson says Donald Trump is “clearly” a racist. Trump said in a CNN interview last week that US District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, the son of Mexican immigrants, was biased against him in lawsuits involving fraud allegations against Trump University, the billionaire’s real estate training school.

Trump claimed that the judge’s Mexican heritage had influenced his opinion because of the presumptive Republican nominee’s plan to build a wall on the US-Mexico border after winning the presidential elections. Speaking in an interview with The Hill newspaper on Monday, Johnson lashed out at Trump for making another controversial statement.

“The latest comments on the Hispanic judge — nothing short of racist,” said Johnson, who served two terms as governor of New Mexico. When asked if he believes Trump is racist, Johnson responded, “Clearly. Clearly. These are incendiary comments to me as a former governor of a state that’s one of the four majority-minority states in the country.” The Libertarian politician said he’s “absolutely” fearful over the idea of Trump winning the White House.

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US President Barack Obama is set to endorse Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for the 2016 election. Various US media outlets made the announcement Tuesday, citing American officials and other sources. White House officials were determining about when and how Obama, along with Vice President Joe Biden should announce their formal endorsement.

The signal from the White House came on a day that Obama’s former secretary of state was close to securing enough delegates to become the presumptive Democratic nominee. “He has indicated he wants to spend a lot of time on the campaign trail, so when it’s time to do that, we’ll go out guns ablazing,” White House Communications Director Jennifer Psaki told the New York Times in an interview. “We are actively thinking through how to use the president on the campaign trail — what works for the nominee, what works for him, and how to utilize his strengths and his appeal.”

Hillary, meanwhile, was hoping to be endorsed by the president, according to her communications director, Jennifer Palmieri. “We are actively thinking through how to use the president on the campaign trail,” Palmieri said.

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US Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders has attacked both his Democratic and Republican rivals, following the latest primary victory by fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton. Sanders on Sunday called on Americans to refrain from voting for either Republican presidential contender Donald Trump or Clinton in November’s election. Addressing supporters in San Diego, California, Sanders blasted Trump for “insulting” women, minorities and veterans in the US while taking a swipe at Clinton for using “Wall Street” money for campaign.

The comments come after Clinton won the Democratic primary in Puerto Rico. The Democratic frontrunner grabbed more than 64 percent of the vote against her rival Sanders. The former secretary of state has now bagged all 60 delegates at stake in the island territory. The victory gives Clinton a significant boost in the long-fought battle for the party’s presidential nomination. It comes ahead of Tuesday’s culminating round in the states of California, New Jersey, New Mexico, South Dakota and Montana. Meanwhile, Clinton once again slammed her leading Republican challenger over some of his comments, saying she would lead a contentious campaign against Trump.

Clinton added that she would use every opportunity to point out why she believes Trump should never get near the White House. She made the remarks in an event in Sacramento. Since Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee in early May, Clinton has directly challenged his ability to handle foreign policy issues and has taken to labeling him a “loose cannon” who will make it more difficult for Washington to operate on the global stage. Recently, Trump slammed Clinton for her foreign policy ‘debacles,’ calling for her to be put behind bars over her “bad judgments.” This year’s US presidential race has been specially marred by countless instances of scandals, mudslinging and onstage vulgarity, where rivals have time and again seized opportunities to blacken their opponents and push them down the gutter.

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US Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has predicted that the Democratic presidential election process would lead to a contested summer convention against party frontrunner Hillary Clinton. Speaking to reporters on Saturday in Los Angeles, California, Sanders showed few signs of surrender, vowing to fight until the 2016 Democratic National Convention in July in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.   Nearing the end of the primary season, a defiant Sanders is pushing back against the likelihood that Clinton will soon declare victory as the Democratic presidential nominee.

Sanders told reporters neither candidate would have enough pledged delegates by the end of the primaries on June 14 to declare victory and would be dependent upon superdelegates to win the nomination. “In other words, the Democratic National Convention will be a contested convention,” he said.

He urged news organizations to hold off on declaring Clinton a victor as the presumptive nominee following Tuesday’s primary election in California and five other states.Clinton, a former senator and secretary of state, is poised to unofficially clinch the presidential nomination following the close of the primary election polls on Tuesday.

“It is extremely unlikely that Secretary Clinton will have the requisite number of pledged delegates to claim victory on Tuesday night,” Sanders said.

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US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump says that his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton should be imprisoned for her use of a private email server while she was US secretary of state. “I will say this, Hillary Clinton has got to go to jail,” Trump told supporters Thursday at a rally in San Jose, California, as he slammed Clinton’s foreign policy speech earlier in the day in which Clinton called Trump dangerous and “temperamentally unfit” to be president.

“Folks, honestly, she is guilty as hell,” Trump said. “Hillary Clinton has to go to jail.” Trump’s criticism of Clinton was among his strongest in a growing escalation of words between the two presidential candidates ahead of California’s June 7 state primary election. Earlier Thursday, Clinton unleashed a blistering criticism of Trump on foreign policy and said he was “unfit” to be president. More than 2,000 emails sent and received by Clinton while working as the top US diplomat between 2009 and 2013 include classified information, which the government bans from being handled outside secure, government-controlled channels.

In a report issued last week, the US State Department’s inspector general said Clinton’s use of a private email server at her home in New York violated the department’s record-keeping rules and that it would have been rejected had she asked department officials. Clinton also faces a separate probe by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Republican lawmakers in Congress appear ready to protest strongly if the FBI closes its investigation without delivering indictments or offering a public explanation.

And although Clinton leads Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in the delegate count, Sanders argues that he still has a path to the Democratic presidential nomination. During her speech on Thursday, Clinton said “Donald Trump’s ideas aren’t just different — they are dangerously incoherent,” Clinton said. “They’re not even really ideas — just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds, and outright lies.” “He’s not just unprepared — he’s temperamentally unfit to hold an office that requires knowledge, stability and immense responsibility,” she continued. The speech was intended to undercut Trump’s ability to woo national security-focused independent and Republican voters, the aide said. “This is not someone who should ever have the nuclear codes,” she declared, claiming Trump could start a war just because somebody “got under his very thin skin.”

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