International NGOs have suspended work in southwestern Yemen after weekend attacks by unknown fighters.

After almost five years of war, millions of Yemenis have become reliant on aid for survival, but they now fear they'll be cut off from this crucial lifeline after attacks on international aid groups operating in their country.

A number of international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) have suspended their work in Al-Dhale’e region after their offices were attacked with rocket-propelled grenades over the weekend.

The attacks in southwest Yemen follow a campaign carried out against the aid groups, accusing them of being "enemies of Islam" and using their work as a front for missionary work.

Fahd, a teacher who preferred not to use his real name, told Middle East Eye that they heard explosions on both Saturday and Sunday and later found out that the offices of several aid organisations were hit.

International NGOs have suspended work in southwestern Yemen after weekend attacks by unknown fighters.

After almost five years of war, millions of Yemenis have become reliant on aid for survival, but they now fear they'll be cut off from this crucial lifeline after attacks on international aid groups operating in their country.

A number of international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) have suspended their work in Al-Dhale’e region after their offices were attacked with rocket-propelled grenades over the weekend.

The attacks in southwest Yemen follow a campaign carried out against the aid groups, accusing them of being "enemies of Islam" and using their work as a front for missionary work.

Fahd, a teacher who preferred not to use his real name, told Middle East Eye that they heard explosions on both Saturday and Sunday and later found out that the offices of several aid organisations were hit.

WikiLeaks has published yet another set of leaked internal documents from within the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) adding even more material to the mountain of evidence that we’ve been lied to about an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria last year which resulted in airstrikes upon that nation from the US, UK and France.

This new WikiLeaks drop includes an email from the OPCW Chief of Cabinet Sebastien Braha (who is reportedly so detested by organisation inspectors that they code named him “Voldemort”) throwing a fit over the Ian Henderson Engineering Assessment which found that the Douma incident was likely a staged event. Braha is seen ordering OPCW staff to “remove all traces, if any, of its delivery/storage/whatever” from the organisation’s secure registry.

Washington must think the rest of the world is as stupid as many of its own politicians are. Its passing into law – signed by President Trump this week – of sanctions to halt the Nord Stream-2 and Turk Stream gas supply projects is a naked imperialist move to bludgeon the European energy market for its own economic advantage.

Russia, Germany and others have defiantly told Washington its weaponizing of economic sanctions will not halt the Nord Stream nor the Turk Stream projects.

As German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said earlier this month, “it is unacceptable” for the US to brazenly interfere in European and Russian energy trade. The American pretext of supposedly “protecting” the national security of its purported European allies is frankly laughable.

n a bid to have President Donald Trump removed from office, the left is pushing the “diagnosis” of a Yale psychiatrist who has ruled him “unfit” to be president. However, Dr. Bandy X Lee’s own dirty little secret has just been exposed — and it’s bad news for her career.

In December 2017, more than a dozen lawmakers secretly met with leading Yale psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X Lee to discuss their concern for the president’s mental health, which they suspect is unstable and rapidly declining. Of course, this was merely another one of their countless plots to get Donald Trump removed from the White House since their frivolous impeachment campaigns have miserably failed.

Home/Articles/Politics/Media Elites To Assange: Fight For Your Own Hide
POLITICS
Media Elites To Assange: Fight For Your Own Hide
The Committee to Protect Journalists mimics the government and drops the jailed Wikileaks founder like a hot potato.

By Alexandros Michailidis/Shutterstock
DECEMBER 26, 2019|12:01 AM
TED GALEN CARPENTER
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange languishes in a British prison awaiting probable extradition to the United States to stand trial for violating the Espionage Act of 1917. Ironically, he is serving jail time for jumping bail on trumped-up sex crime charges in Sweden that even the Swedish government has now abandoned. Most Western, especially American, mainstream journalists, though, have expressed at most tepid opposition to the persecution of Assange, even as reports mount that his health has deteriorated to an alarming extent.

This is shameful and jeopardizes the news media’s own long-term interests.

Moscow’s deployment of ‘Avangard’ hypersonic warheads means the US missile defense installations in Europe are now obsolete – and that Washington would have to spend a lot of money it doesn’t have in order to catch up.
Video released by the Russian defense ministry on Friday shows the hypersonic glider warheads being loaded onto silo-based missiles. For now, the Avangards will be mounted on the UR-100N (or SS-19 Stiletto, as NATO calls them) ballistic missiles, until the RS-28 Sarmat is ready to enter service.

Hypersonic weapons fly far faster than the speed of sound. Avangard is capable of reaching Mach 27 without losing control or disintegrating under heat and pressure. This means that the weapon can outmaneuver any defenses on its approach phase, rendering it “absolutely invulnerable to any air or missile defense system,” in the words of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The court that granted the FBI surveillance warrants on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page has only ordered that the FBI review all warrant applications related to one FBI attorney and not all FBI agents involved in misconduct, according to a report.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) earlier this month ordered the FBI to re-verify all previous Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant applications involving Kevin Clinesmith, the FBI attorney who falsified evidence in the FBI’s efforts to seek a renewed surveillance warrant against Page.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is in the spotlight for “dining with far-right figures,” and their influence over the information that appears in your feed is apparent. However, Facebook isn’t the only Silicon Valley firm that’s masquerading as nonpartisan as it curates the “facts” you see in ads, posts, or searches: Google, Twitter, Microsoft, and others are deeply wedded to the U.S. security state and the billionaires it upholds.

Walter Lippmann’s groundbreaking 1922 study of the news media, “Public Opinion,” begins with a chapter titled, “The World Outside and the Pictures in our Heads,” in which he presents the media as a bottleneck through which information about the world beyond the perception of our senses must pass. Aside from the question of which stories get passed through that bottleneck, which information about an event that survives the crucible of condensation into an article, news bulletin or wire is determined by the biases of the writer and editor.

SOURCE: MIDDLE EAST MONITOR

Israel’s foreign minister on Thursday said Tel Aviv would return to “the policy of assassinations” against Palestinian resistance figures in the Gaza Strip, Reuters reports.
In statements he made to Israel’s army radio, Yisrael Katz indicated that there was “an intelligence effort to identify the rockets’ launchers and work to eliminate them.”

He stressed: “Intelligence efforts are currently focused on determining who is responsible for ordering missile launch instructions in order to work to eliminate him.”

On Wednesday evening, Israel’s iron dome anti-missile system intercepted a missile reportedly fired from the Gaza Strip towards the country’s south while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was attending an election rally in Ashkelon province.

(5:50-) It’s a Brennan operation. It was an American disinformation, and the fucking President, at one point when they even started telling the press — they were back[ground]-briefing the press, the head of the NSA was going and telling the press, the fucking cocksucker Rogers, telling the press that we [they] even know who in the Russian military intelligence service leaked it. All bullshit.

In other words, besides the information from Bill Binney, who was an NSA whistleblower who took early retirement so he wouldn’t have to continue doing what people such as John Brennan demanded, Seymour Hersh there provided yet additional confirmation to this account from the also-early-retired whistleblowing UK Ambassador Craig Murray — a close friend of Assange — who claimed that he had “met” the person in DC who supplied the thumb drive (USB stick), which then was delivered (he didn’t say how) to Assange:

Authored by David Archibald via The American Thinker,

The Danes have put extra resources into controlling the country’s links to Sweden because of bombs going off in Denmark due to people coming from Sweden. The people from Sweden are Islamist criminals. The Swedish government reacted to the Danish move by calling the Danes Nazis. Swedish society has changed for the worse, and the Swedish people are aware of what they have lost.

All this is known, but what is interesting is that a former head of the Swedish truck-maker Scania, a Mr. Leif Ostling, has said Sweden is headed for civil war because of the problem of its violent migrants who have no inclination to integrate into Swedish society. As a successful businessman, his views can’t be dismissed as being from some sort of antisocial loon living in his mother’s basement.

All in all, there are plenty of guns to go round to have a civil war with. This won’t be a brutish affair conducted with knives and sticks.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has vetoed a non-controversial bipartisan bill that would have allowed all federal judges to officiate weddings in the state because some might have been nominated to the bench by President Donald Trump.

"I cannot in good conscience support legislation that would authorize such actions by federal judges who are appointed by this federal administration," Cuomo's veto message stated, the New York Post reported.

"President Trump does not embody who we are as New Yorkers," the Democratic governor added on Friday. "The cornerstones that built our great state are diversity, tolerance, and inclusion. Based on these reasons, I must veto this bill."

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has vetoed a non-controversial bipartisan bill that would have allowed all federal judges to officiate weddings in the state because some might have been nominated to the bench by President Donald Trump.

"I cannot in good conscience support legislation that would authorize such actions by federal judges who are appointed by this federal administration," Cuomo's veto message stated, the New York Post reported.

"President Trump does not embody who we are as New Yorkers," the Democratic governor added on Friday. "The cornerstones that built our great state are diversity, tolerance, and inclusion. Based on these reasons, I must veto this bill."

On Monday, Lebanon’s Al Mayadeen television reported what it called information on what’s in Trump’s so-called deal of the century.

From what’s reported, it establishes the illusion of a “New Palestine” state in parts of the West Bank and Gaza, short of the real thing Israel and the US reject, both areas connected by an elevated highway.

It excludes 70% or more of West Bank land controlled by Israel, including the Jordan Valley, closed military zones, exclusive Jewish commercial areas, tourist sites, no-go areas, and illegal settlements on stolen Palestinian land, Jerusalem to remain undivided, the city “shared between Israel and New Palestine.”
Haaretz quoted an unnamed congressional source, saying “(o)ne argument against (the budget request is that) no one thinks (Trump’s) peace plan is coming out any time soon, so why devote money to it,” adding:

There are still some rich cities in America, and even some glitzy ones, but when we pull back the curtains and survey the entire stage, today we see a preponderance of decay. Detroit, Chicago, many California cities, much of Florida, and so many more with not only neighborhoods but entire counties and larger areas rotting from the inside. The great corporations are gone, the jobs are gone, the wealth is gone; only decaying skeletons remain to remind us of what once was. So much of America today is just junkyards, abandoned homes, lifeless slums, empty lots, rusting carcasses of factories, and homes full of despair.

To date, Gaza's Ministry of Health reports that 50 protesters have been shot in the eye by Israeli soldiers since the demonstrations began last March leaving them permanently blind.

Media coverage and social media posts went wild when Palestinian photojournalist Muath Amarneh was blinded in his left eye after he was hit by a rubber bullet while covering a protest in the West Bank.

However, Amarneh was far from unique; Israeli snipers targeting participants in Gaza's weekly Great Return March protests have aimed for the legs – and eyes. To date, Gaza's Ministry of Health reports that 50 protesters have been shot in the eye since the demonstrations began March 30, 2018 – leaving them permanently blind.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley sought to defend the Afghan War on Friday, despite the Afghanistan Papers showing systematic official lies about the failed conflict, insisting that the documents were a “mischaracterization” of the war, and that there was no unified decision to deceive the public.

Rather, the position here seems to be that hundreds of Pentagon officials took it upon themselves and each individually decided to deceive the public a little bit, culminating in a colossal lie which couldn’t be explicitly blamed on anyone.

Gen. Milley insisted the war had been a success in that there hadn’t been any specific terror attacks out of Afghanistan for the war’s duration, and particularly objected to the idea that anyone had died “in vain” in the conflict.

SOURCE: BREAK THE MATRIX
House Democrats have slipped an unqualified renewal of the draconian PATRIOT Act into an emergency funding bill – voting near-unanimously for sweeping surveillance carte blanche that was the basis for the notorious NSA program.

A three-month reauthorization of the notorious PATRIOT Act was shoehorned into a last-minute continuing resolution (CR) funding the US government, bundling measures needed to avert yet another government shutdown with a continuation of the wildly-intrusive surveillance powers passed after the 9/11 terror attacks. Democrats voted almost unanimously for it, granting the far-reaching surveillance capabilities to the very same president they’re trying to impeach.

SOURCE: NICOLAS DAVIES VIA COUNTERPUNCH

The trove of U.S. “Lessons Learned” documents on Afghanistan published by the Washington Post portrays, in excruciating detail, the anatomy of a failed policy, scandalously hidden from the public for 18 years. The “Lessons Learned” papers, however, are based on the premise that the U.S. and its allies will keep intervening militarily in other countries, and that they must therefore learn the lessons of Afghanistan to avoid making the same mistakes in future military occupations.

Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

Lots of news outlets labeled yesterday’s House vote to impeach President Trump “historic”. It was. But what was historic about it was not that Donald Trump became the third president to be impeached. What was historic was the way it was done. That was a first.

Because it was not the House that impeached President Donald Trump, it was the Democratic Party. Which just happened to have the majority in the House. They appear to think that this is all that’s needed, which is a big mistake and an even bigger gamble. A gamble on the value and future of the US Constitution and the entire political system.

President Trump told a crowd of steelworkers in Illinois in July 2018 that "After years of shutdowns and cutbacks today the blast furnace here in Granite City is blazing bright, workers are back on the job and we are once again pouring new American steel into the spine of our country."

While US Steel's Granite City might be operational for the time being, the steel producer has just announced it will shut down a "significant portion" of its Great Lakes Works facility, slash its dividend, terminate 80% of its share buyback program, and layoff 1,500 workers.

Great Lakes Works is expected to halt operations by April 2020. The mill rolls slabs into sheets of steel and has been battered by the manufacturing recession and trade war. The facility laid off 200 workers earlier this year, with another 1,500 in the near term, reported 247 Wall Street.

Medical authorities in al-Anbar province in Western Iraq report a sharp rise in the number of registered cases of cancer diagnosis as a result of the US military's use of banned munitions at the time of occupation.

"The radiation of prohibited ammunition used during the US occupation of Iraq is the most important cause for the heightened number of cancer patients in al-Anbar province," an oncologist in the province was quoted as saying by the Arabic-language Afaq news channel on Wednesday.

He noted that people in al-Anbar are facing different problems risen from the Americans' use of banned weapons and munitions, and said that cancer is a disease whose treatment is much costly, while people in the province cannot afford it, and even the few that could bear the huge expenses are facing shortage of cancer drugs.

The US troops used white phosphorus in the offensive in the Iraqi city of Falluja in 2004, the US said.

A pro-NATO Czech think tank has another piece of unsolicited advice for Western governments. Now they should refuse to give access or interviews to Russian media, who are ”not real journalists”, according to the ”wise censor”.
At first blush, the ‘Kremlin Watch Strategy’ paper published last week by the Prague-based ‘European Values Center for Security Policy’ sounds like another self-serving attempt to cash in on the anti-Russian hysteria that has gripped many a Western capital for the past several years.

There are some two dozen mentions of “funding,” mostly in the context of urging the European Union to spend more money on “independent” NGOs – such as themselves, obviously – to battle “hostile Russian interference” the authors see under every bed.

Congress and especially Congressional leadership of both parties are all as guilty as the three lying Administrations. They were part of the big lie, falsely presenting to the American people as “expert” witnesses only those bought-and-paid-for Beltway neocon think tankers.

What is even more shocking than the release of this “smoking gun” evidence that the US government wasted two trillion dollars and killed more than three thousand Americans and more than 150,000 Afghans while lying through its teeth about the war is that you could hear a pin drop in the mainstream media about it. Aside from the initial publication in the Washington Post, which has itself been a major cheerleader for the war in Afghanistan, the mainstream media has shown literally no interest in what should be the story of the century.

In order to bring home the significance of the Persian Gulf’s oil in the energy-starved industrialized world, here are a few stats from the OPEC data: Saudi Arabia has the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves of 265 billion barrels and its daily oil production is 10 million barrels; Iran and Iraq each has 150 billion barrels reserves and has the capacity to produce 5 million barrels per day each; while UAE and Kuwait each has 100 billion barrels reserves and produces 3 million barrels per day each; thus, all the littoral states of the Persian Gulf, together, hold 788 billion barrels, more than half of world’s 1477 billion barrels proven oil reserves.

The BBC has responded to criticism over its coverage of the UK’s general election by calling for their online critics to be banned from social media.

International Rights Advocates filed a federal class action against the five companies in Washington, D.C. on Sunday, where the group is based. The complaint claims that the firms "are knowingly benefiting from and aiding and abetting the cruel and brutal use of young children" to mine cobalt in extremely dangerous conditions.

The defendants have known for a "significant period of time" that Congo’s mining sector "is dependent upon children," the complaint said, adding that cobalt mined in the region is listed as a good produced by child labor or forced labor by the US Department of Labor.

The world's biggest metal exchange is getting serious about child labor and conflict minerals.

"Further, the horrors of the plight of these children has been widely reported in the media," the complaint said, citing reports about the cobalt pipeline published by the Washington Post, the Guardian and others.

Turkey has warned that the United States’ decision to end a decades-old arms embargo on Cyprus would be a “dangerous escalation.”

In a statement issued late Tuesday, the Turkish Foreign Ministry said the US decision “will have no outcome other than hampering efforts toward a settlement on the island and creating a dangerous escalation.”

The US Congress voted Tuesday to lift the arms embargo on Cyprus, which has been in place since 1987. The measure has passed both chambers of Congress as part of a massive defense spending bill, with President Donald Trump likely to sign it.

The bill comes at a time of tensions between Turkey and the US over such issues as Ankara’s purchase of the Russian S-400 system and Washington’s support for Kurdish-led militants in Syria.

Several of the US largest technology firms have been accused of profiting from child labor in Africa cobalt mines, a new lawsuit says.

Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Tesla and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, must pay damages over knowingly profiting from African children laboring under brutal conditions, alleges the suit filed by the nongovernmental organization International Rights Advocates this week.

Cobalt is an essential element used in the rechargeable lithium batteries that fuel many electronic devices.

The Kremlin has said that it trusts the opinion of a senior Russian general, who has said that NATO's intensified drills this year are an indication that the military bloc is preparing for a major conflict.

Valery Gerasimov, the chair of the Russian General Staff, shared the wary view that the Russian military have about NATO's maneuvers on Tuesday as he gave a year-end briefing to foreign military attaches in Moscow.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the opinion was based on analyses of data collected by the Russian military and should not be dismissed.

"In this case the professional opinion may be the only correct one, so the presidential administration is in no position to put forward its own military assessment," he said.

Gerasimov said the increased number and scale of military exercises conducted by NATO members this year indicates that the alliance "is purposefully training its troops to be engaged in a major military conflict."

Chancellor Angela Merkel has insisted that Berlin will not give into pressure from Washington after the US Senate approved a bill sanctioning German companies working on a pipeline that will deliver natural gas from Russia.
During Wednesday’s Q&A session in parliament, lawmakers asked Merkel about the possibility of the US slapping sanctions on German companies building the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

The chancellor said that she firmly opposes such sanctions because they have an extraterritorial effect. They will not push Berlin to abandon the project, however, she said.

The US Senate on 17 December passed a $738 billion defence bill for the 2020 fiscal year that, in particular, includes sanctions against Nord Stream 2, TurkStream, and bars military-to-military cooperation with Russia.

Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov has slammed US sanctions on Nord Stream 2 as “a perfect example of unfair competition", saying that Washington is imposing more expensive gas on Europe. He continued on by saying that both "Moscow and Europe dislike US sanctions on Nord Stream 2, as these measures violate international law".

"We assume that this project will be completed", Peskov told reporters, when asked whether the construction of the pipeline could be halted due to the sanctions.

eta Thunberg, the 16-year-old environmentalist who started skipping school in 2018 to protest outside the Swedish parliament, has long been promoted a special needs teen whose tireless mission to shame the west into cap-and-trade went 'viral' organically.

In fact, TIME Magazine's Person of the Year had a professional film crew "following Thunberg from her early school strike in Stockholm all the way to parliaments and massive international protests" for a forthcoming documentary on HULU tentatively titled 'Greta,' which is set to air in 2020, according to Deadline.

Director Nathan Grossman - who previously directed a Swedish film about one man's reflection on his life as a carnivore titled "Lusts of the Meat" (Köttets lustar) - has been documenting Greta's mission "to make the world understand the urgency of the climate crisis."

Authored by Daniel Lazare via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time. So said Abraham Lincoln – maybe. But whoever it was forgot to mention an important corollary: fun as it may be to pull the wool over people’s eyes, you’ll writhe in agony for an equal period once the truth emerges and the fraud is exposed.

This is the significance of Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s devastating report on the FBI investigation of Russiagate suspect Carter Page.

A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that the US government is entitled to the proceeds from Edward Snowden's memoir, as well as any money he earns from paid speeches, because the former National Security Agency employee disclosed classified information without approval, according to the Washington Post.

Snowden has been charged with espionage since 2013, when he exposed top-secret surveillance documents in what may have been the biggest security breach in U.S. history.

The former contractor sees himself as a whistleblower compelled to reveal sweeping surveillance programs hidden from the American people. But through two administrations, the government has viewed him as a traitor who escaped justice by fleeing to Russia.

Unable to put him on trial, the Justice Department this year moved to cut off his profits from the book he published, “Permanent Record,” as well as from paid speeches. -Washington Post

A CNN panel expressed disbelief over its newly-released poll showing impeachment support collapsing — among Democrat voters.

Host Alisyn Camerota first downplayed the implications of the CNN poll, noting that Democrat support of impeachment has “softened a little bit.”

The poll conducted between December 12-15 shows Democrat support of impeachment at 77%, a 13-point drop since last month.

SOURCE: THEGRAYZONE.COM
Humiliating scandals are destroying right-wing leader Luis Fernando Camacho and the right is fracturing as a more militant MAS party readies for an uphill election battle

BY WYATT REED
La Paz, Bolivia – Just one month after ruling elites and right-wing politicians seized power in Bolivia with a military coup, the fragile unity they briefly enjoyed has erupted into a bitter public feud.

Local analysts had predicted that coup leader Luis Fernando Camacho and Pumari could unite the right from the country’s east and west, both indigenous and white or mestizo. They were seen as an insurmountable dream team. That alliance now lies smoldering, with the two presidential frontrunners openly airing their dirty laundry amid a vicious power struggle.

SOURCE: BOING BOING

It’s a Christmas miracle! Disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein showed up at court last week wearing a comically baggy suit and shuffling unsteadily with a walker. The very next day he was spotted in a New York department store, casually ambling through the aisles without assistance, loving family in tow. Page Six has the photographic evidence.

James O'Keefe at Project Veritas has requested that everyone upload this documentary since Youtube removed it as it approached 1 million views in less than one day!

GOOGLE does not want you to see the stark reality: it is a social engineering, ...

Shockingly, the CONSERVATIVE Chris Wallace of Fox News invited the LIBERAL Adam Schiff on Fox News Sunday to push his impeachment agenda.

It might seem strange that a CONSERVATIVE would be helping a LIBERAL push his agenda like this, but let me warn you: this has nothing at all to do with the fact that both Wallace and Schiff are Jewish. That is an absolute, complete and total coincidence. If you even for one single second think it is something more than pure coincidence, you are an anti-Semite, and if you are having that thought on a university campus in America, you can and should be immediately dragged away by paramilitary police forces under Donald Trump’s executive order protecting Jews from the analysis of coincidences on campus.

Officials in Santa Rosa are set to unveil emergency proposals to shelter people in fairgrounds as the city - and the state - struggles with a homeless emergency where more than 130,000 people are living on the streets across California.

In Santa Rosa, around 185 people have set up a mile-long camp along the Joe Rodota Trail, next to Highway 12.

The proposed plan, set to be unveiled on Tuesday, will allow some of those living in the camp and the rest of the 3,000 homeless people in Sonoma County to move into the fairgrounds, The Press Democrat reports.

Leaders in the city, struggling with the biggest homeless camp in its history, are said to have been inspired by how the fairgrounds were used during wildfires and flooding.

Scientists have for the first time registered and mapped the aftermath of underwater nuclear tests from the 1940s and 1950s, as they combed the so-called Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, Popular Mechanics reported citing the research revealed at a 2019 meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Using advanced sonar, the team of researchers scanned the sea floor for evidence of the first two tests on the atoll, which were conducted as part of Operation Crossroads.
The first test, Able, was a 23 kiloton atomic bomb dropped from a B-29 bomber and set to explode at 1,500 to 2,000 feet.

The explosion was 50 percent more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Able sank five warships but according to scientists there is no distinct sign of the test on the seabed.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has explained in an interview with Chinese broadcaster Phoenix Television that two goals must be achieved in order to make American military forces finally withdraw from the country, where they have been stationed without the government's authorisation or a UN mandate.

Firstly, all terrorist groups on Syrian territory must be eradicated, as the fight against them is being used by the US government as a pretext to keep its forces present in the Arab Republic, Assad stated. The Syrian president said that the second step would involve convincing Washington's allies among the local population, presumably referring to Kurds, to unite their forces with the Syrian government instead of the foreign forces.

"These groups must be persuaded, one way or another and particularly through dialogue, that it is in all our interests in Syria that they embrace the homeland and join the Syrian state’s efforts to liberate all its territories", Assad said.