Intense clashes broke-out between the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and Turkish-backed rebels in east Aleppo this evening after a relatively quiet few months.

According to a military source in Damascus, the intense clashes broke out after the Syrian Arab Army fired a couple of mortar shells towards the Free Syrian Army’s (FSA) positions at Al-Bab in east Aleppo.

In response, the Turkish-backed rebels fired several missiles towards the Syrian Arab Army’s positions in the nearby town of Tadef, which is just south of Al-Bab.

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” – Mark Twain

“…most ‘flu’ appears to have nothing to do with influenza. Every year, hundreds of thousands of respiratory specimens are tested across the US. Of those tested, on average 16% are found to be influenza positive.” – From the British Medical Journal editor, Peter Doshi, MD

“71 people would need to be treated with the flu vaccine to prevent one case. In other words, the flu vaccine did nothing for 70 out of 71 who received it. That means this study found the flu vaccine failed 99% (70/71).” — Dr David Brownstein

“Under ideal conditions (when the vaccine actually matches the main viruses circulating that season) you need to vaccinate 33 healthy adults to avoid one set of influenza symptoms. 33 is what is called the NNV (Number Needed to Vaccinate).” – Dr Tom Jefferson of the Cochrane Collaboration (Cochrane Database Syst. Rev. 2018. Feb. 1,2:CD001269)

Right about now, there should be two tiny rovers hopping around the surface of the large asteroid Ryugu.

The pair of cylindrical Minerva-II rovers were basically flung off the Japanese Space Agency's Hayabusa-2 spacecraft on Thursday. Their job is to scout out the surface of the space rock before the larger probe attempts a landing itself next month.

On the way down, the rovers' on-board cameras captured their descent in the form of the shadows that the duo of 7-inch (18 cm) robots projected on the surface of Ryugu.

The above image was taken from just 80 meters (87 yards) above the surface.

A DEADLY flu pandemic like the Spanish flu could happen again, wiping out 400 million globally, leading flu experts have warned.

It's 100 years since the 1918 pandemic killed tens of millions of people - yet there's nothing stopping the flu virus becoming just as deadly again.

National Weather Service forecasters are expecting the first widespread frost to appear late Friday night into early Saturday morning in parts of the Upper Peninsula and the northern Lower Peninsula, including areas around Cadillac, Roscommon, West Branch and Gaylord. A blast of cold air will push temperatures into the mid-30s.

"Hopefully, this cold weather will make for good fall colors," said Tim Locker, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Gaylord.

And so it starts. Russia must attack Israel, no—she must obliterate it, Putin is "soft", the world is coming to an end, Zionists are in control of Kremlin, Russia turns another cheek. And on, and on, and on. The chorus of noble warriors with the evils of Zionism is getting louder with each day. Behind this hysteria surrounding the tragedy of Russian VKS' IL-20 somehow crucial and widely publicized news have been ignored completely. It is no surprise they were ignored by all kinds of "specialists" in strategy, politics, and armchair strategists (I am one myself). The news are pretty simple. Lt. General Alexander Ionov, former Deputy Chief of Main Staff of Russian Air Force from 1991 through 2001, stated to popular Russian media Zvezda that it is guaranteed that Syrian Air Defense forces were not provided with compatible IFF equipment and codes.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein proposed wearing a wire to secretly record the president and raised the possibility of forcibly removing him through the 25th Amendment, The New York Times reported Friday.

The bombshell story cited unnamed people saying Rosenstein considered taping President Trump in the White House in the aftermath of Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director James Comey in May 2017. Rosenstein reportedly proposed such steps because he was alarmed by the chaos consuming the presidency in the early days that followed Comey’s firing, according to the Times.

The Times cited unnamed people who “were briefed either on the events themselves or on memos written by FBI officials.”

Rosenstein broadly denied the allegations.

WASHINGTON—Days after the Trump administration instituted a controversial travel ban in January 2017, Google employees discussed ways they might be able to tweak the company’s search-related functions to show users how to contribute to pro-immigration organizations and contact lawmakers and government agencies, according to internal company emails.

BuzzFeed News has obtained details of plans being drawn up by ministers that also include a compulsory code of conduct and age verification for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

A new theory has emerged in the case of whether Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted accuser Christine Blasey Ford roughly 35 years ago; it was Kavanaugh's high school look-alike, whose high school house better fits Ford's description, and who kept in touch with the other guy allegedly in the room, Mark Judge.

The theory was presented Thursday afternoon by Ed Whelan, a former clerk to USSC Justice Antonin Scalia and currently president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), a conservative think tank. Using entirely circumstantial evidence which could certainly ruin the life of the man at the center of the new theory, Whelan suggests that Kavanaugh's high school doppelgänger, Chris Garrett, may have in fact been responsible for Blasey Ford's recollection of the alleged incident.

California governor Jerry Brown recently spoke a veiled threat to president Donald Trump. Brown is dissatisfied with Trump’s stance on the often altered “science” of “climate change” and said, “something’s got to happen to this guy.”

In an interview that aired Monday, Jerry Brown called the president a “saboteur” in the fight to combat climate change, and in a thinly veiled threat said that “something’s got to happen to this guy.” Speaking to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell at an environmental summit in San Francisco last week, Brown tore into Trump for the president’s tweets about the death toll in Puerto Rico from last year’s Hurricane Maria and urged voters to vote for Democrats in November’s midterm elections in an effort to thwart Trump’s agenda, according to Fox News.

Brown was quoted as saying:

“We never had a president who was engaged in this kind of behavior. I mean he’s not telling the truth; he keeps changing his mind; he’s sabotaging the world order in many respects.”

A university professor in Sweden is under investigation for "anti-feminism" and "transphobia" after he said that there are fundamental differences between men and women which are "biologically founded" and that genders cannot be regarded as "social constructs alone," reports Academic Rights Watch.

For his transgression, Germund Hesslow - a professor of neuroscience at Lund University - who holds dual PhDs in philosophy and neurophysiology, may lose his job - telling RT that a "full investigation" has been ordered, and that there "have been discussions about trying to stop the lecture or get rid of me, or have someone else give the lecture or not give the lecture at all."

“If you answer such a question you are under severe time pressure, you have to be extremely brief — and I used wording which I think was completely innocuous, and that apparently the student didn't,” Hesslow said.

Anybody who has paid close attention to press reports claiming that Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort, and Alan Weisselberg could be the "perfect storm of cooperators" probably already realizes that Special Counsel Robert Mueller and federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York and New York state investigators are grasping at straws. But in case you needed any more evidence, consider a report Thursday afternoon from ABC News citing anonymous sources (likely from inside the Mueller camp, just like all other leaks pertaining to grand jury testimony or private meetings with investigators) claiming that Cohen has sat for hours worth of interviews with investigators from the special counsel's office.

Big tech companies like Google have the power to “shift upwards of 12 million votes with no one knowing they’re doing so,” a research psychologist told Radio Sputnik Thursday, underscoring the influence profit-making firms can have on public elections.

That, he said, is too much power for "just a couple of executives" and is why tech giant monopolies need to be thought of as public utilities and not private entities.

Thirty-three more schools in Detroit, Michigan were revealed to have elevated levels of lead and copper in their drinking water, bringing the total, of 86 schools tested so far, to 57. Ultimately, 106 schools are to have their water tested.

"Lead contamination of tap water disproportionately impacts economically depressed cities and communities of color, from Detroit to Jackson, Mississippi; to Ithaca, New York; to Flint, Michigan," Mary Grant, campaign director of Public Water for All, told Sputnik News.

In total, the district has released results from testing at 86 of their 106 school buildings, of which 57 have tested for high levels of lead or copper. That's about two-thirds of all Detroit schools.

A “Super-Earth” exoplanet has been discovered ? exactly at the location described in “Star Trek” as the planet Vulcan, the homeworld of one of the sci-fi franchise’s most well-known characters, Spock.

A team of scientists spotted an exoplanet twice the size of the Earth as through the the Dharma Planet Survey (DPS) led by University of Florida astronomer Jian Ge. The “Super-Earth” orbits the HD 26965 system, commonly known as 40 Eridani – a triple star system, Vice reports.

Even though it is not clear whether India will receive a waiver with regard to US sanctions against Russia, New Delhi has made it clear that it will go ahead with the S-400 air defense system deal as it is at an "advanced stage."

New Delhi (Sputnik) — A defense analyst has suggested that America's reservations against India acquiring the Russian air defense system is mainly borne out of the fear that if the S-400 is used to test the stealth capabilities of American fighter jets, India would have access to the data of American jets and that data could be leaked to Russia or other adversaries of the US.

Former squadron leader of the Indian Air Force and an independent defense analyst Vijainder K Thakur confirmed that S-400 systems can be used not only to identify radar tracks belonging to America's F-35s, but to also possibly determine the configuration of an F-35.

US President Donald Trump has accused OPEC’s Middle East producers of “pushing for higher and higher oil prices.” Trump, who is a proponent of cheap crude, has told OPEC countries they would not be safe for long without the US.

A West Virginia high school counselor is accused of using a school computer program to raise her daughter's grades in order for the teen to obtain college scholarship money.

Mellissa Krystynak, 49, of Stuart, Florida, has been indicted on six counts of mail fraud.

The mother worked as a counselor from 2011 until 2017 at Greenbrier West High School in Charmco, West Virginia.

Two of Krystynak's children also attended the school.

US Attorney Mike Stuart said in a news release that Krystynak used her administrative access to change more than 35 of her daughter's grades.

God Bless America. On 15 February 2016, our President, speaking to a wildly enthusiastic crowd in Bluffton, South Carolina, promised that he would find out — and inform the American public — “who really knocked down the World Trade Center.”

As all engaged and informed citizens now know, the 9/11 Commission was a controlled cover-up at the same level of atrocity as 9/11 itself, and totally comparable to the Warren Commission controlled cover-up on the assassination of John F. Kennedy by Lyndon Baines Johnson, Allen Dulles, J. Edgard Hoover, and varied private sector participants as well as the government of Israel, which sent two witnesses to Dallas.

This collection of twenty-eight memoranda, most one page but a few two pages and one four pages, provide the President all he needs to know to do three big things when he gives his planned speech on 9/11 on 11 September 2018:

Juanita Broaddrick released a new book titled You’d Better Put Some Ice On That about when President Bill Clinton allegedly raped her.

Broaddrick, who first came forward with claims of the sexual assault in 1999, contends Clinton said “you’d better put some ice on that”after the rape occurred as he he was leaving her hotel room in April 1978 in Little Rock, Arkansas. Broaddrick said she wrote the book to set the record straight and “ensure victims everywhere are believed.”

The AIPAC sponsored bill that guarantees $38 billion to Israel over the next ten years is a dramatic departure from the deal offered under President Obama’s 2016 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).[1] Passed by the House of Representatives on September 12, 2018, the United States-Israel Security Assistance Authorization Act of 2018 effectively rolls back every limitation that President Obama placed on the amount of aid we give to Israel.

In addition, the House version provides Israel even more perks than the version passed by the Senate on August 11.

The latest news from Yellowstone National Park is a little terrifying, but experts keep reminding us that we have nothing to fear. The thermal activity in the park has been increasing lately, and geysers have reportedly been shooting out rocks.

Authorities have been forced to shut down certain areas of the park after hot plumes of water erupted from the ground several feet up in the air. This prompted fears that new geysers are forming over the caldera. New vents were seen blasting water and steam across the basin area in Geyser Hill, ever since the Ear Spring erupted on Saturday shooting water up to 30 feet in the air. The new activity was said to be endangering visitors as “debris and rocks flew into the sky,” according to The Express UK.

Two Russian Tu-160 strategic bombers have conducted scheduled flights over neutral waters of the Arctic Ocean, the Russian Defense Ministry said late on Thursday.

"Two strategic Tu-160 bombers carried out a planned flight over the neutral waters of the basins of the Barents, Norwegian and Northern seas. Aviation support for the long-range aircraft was provided by the crews of MiG-31 fighters," the statement read.

The flight’s duration was more than 14 hours, according to the ministry.
"At separate stages of the route, Russian aircraft were shadowed by Eurofighter Typhoon and F-16 fighters of the Royal Air Force," the ministry noted.

Beijing “cherishes” the freedom of navigation principle but will not remain idle as Western powers use it as a pretext to show off their “military might” and “create trouble” in the South China Sea, China’s UK ambassador has said.

“Some big countries outside the region did not seem to appreciate the peace and tranquility in the South China Sea. They sent warships and aircraft all the way to the South China Sea to create trouble,” Ambassador Liu Xiaoming told the annual Induction Programme for Commonwealth Diplomats, held in London.

Months after eruptions at the Big Island's Kilauea volcano forced the record-long closure of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, the popular tourist destination will reopen Saturday without one key element — lava.

Back in April, a massive lava lake continued to boil and bubble at the park until eruptions beginning in May emptied the lake entirely of its molten rock. Now, all that remains is a large, gaping hole.

"Beginning in May, 2018, the lava lake that existed inside Halema‘uma‘u crater disappeared and lava flows from Pu?u ???? crater have ceased," the park warned on its website. "There is no molten lava or lava glow to see anywhere in or out of the park."

Two tiny hopping robots have begun their historic attempt to land on a big asteroid in deep space.

Japan's Hayabusa2 probe, which has been circling the 3,000-foot-wide (900 meters) asteroid Ryugu since late June, deployed two little "rovers" called MINERVA-II1A and MINERVA-II1B at 12:06 a.m. EDT (0406 GMT) today (Sept. 21). The event occurred when the mother ship was about 180 feet (55 meters) above Ryugu's pockmarked, boulder-strewn surface, mission team members said.

"The separation of MINERVA-II1 has been confirmed! The state of the spacecraft is normal," JAXA officials announced via Twitter just after the rovers deployed. That confirmation came after an apparently tense descent for Hayabusa2 flight controllers. "In the control room, you can hear the sound of deep breaths around the room," JAXA officials wrote just before the rovers were released.

In order to understand Turkey’s approach toward the conflict in Syria, one first needs to explain the military situation there as of September 2018.

There are localized clashes between militant groups led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda) and the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) in northern Latakia and southern Idlib. The Syrian Arab Air Force and the Russian Aerospace Forces have recently carried out a series of strikes on weapons depots, equipment and UAV workshops and key facilities belonging to militants in southern and southwestern Idlib.

UNBELIEVABLE!

Sources tell Wired Sources that Democrat Congressional aides are seeking to roll out second Kavanaugh accuser 'to finish the job'. It's not clear if they already found a 2nd accuser.

Fraud.

The more this goes on, the more of a fraud it becomes.

Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her in high school, has gone back and forth on her willingness to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

At first, her attorney said she was willing to take the stand and reveal her story on President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee. (RELATED: Kavanaugh Accuser Christine Ford Agrees to Republican Wishes – Will Testify Before Senate Judiciary Committee.)

Then Ford took it back. She refused to testify before the FBI investigated the matter, despite the federal agency not having jurisdiction over the matter. (RELATED: Kavanaugh Accuser Ignores Calls to Testify – After Volunteering to Testify.)

Now, she is once again willing to testify but only with some preconditions met. A few of these demands are reasonable: her safety is assured and Kavanaugh isn’t in the same room as her when it occurs.

Feinstein: We’re Better than this.
Me: NO YOU’RE NOT- now or back in 1999 when you
@SenFeinstein
refused to read my deposition for the independent counsel, along with ALL Democrats. Your vote had already been decided before testimony. SHAME ON YOU.

CIA operations follow the same recurring script. First, American business interests abroad are threatened by a popular or democratically elected leader. The people support their leader because he intends to conduct land reform, strengthen unions, redistribute wealth, nationalize foreign-owned industry, and regulate business to protect workers, consumers and the environment. So, on behalf of American business, and often with their help, the CIA mobilizes the opposition. First it identifies right-wing groups within the country (usually the military), and offers them a deal: “We’ll put you in power if you maintain a favorable business climate for us.” The Agency then hires, trains and works with them to overthrow the existing government (usually a democracy).

The congresswoman has accused President Trump and Vice President Pence of protecting “al-Qaeda and other jihadist forces in Syria.”

Israel must provide Moscow with more information about the downing of a Russian military aircraft near the Syrian coast earlier this week, Russia's Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Thursday, the Interfax news agency reported.

Fifteen Russian crew were killed when the IL-20 surveillance plane crashed near Latakia in northern Syria on Monday. Russia has said Syria shot the plane down shortly after Israeli jets hit the area, and accused Israel of creating the dangerous conditions by failing to give sufficient advance notice.

Hezbollah’s leader has warned Israel of a fate it “has never expected” if it chooses to wage a new war, reminding the regime that the Lebanese resistance movement is now in possession of precision rockets to Tel Aviv’s dismay.

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah made the comments during a Thursday speech in Beirut to a large crowd of mourners marking Ashura, the martyrdom anniversary of Imam Hussein, the third Shia Imam.

He further said the balance of power in the region has changed in favor of the anti-Israel axis of resistance, and that the Tel Aviv regime has failed in all its attempts to prevent Lebanon’s Hezbollah from achieving precision rockets.

“No matter what you do to cut the route, the matter is over and the resistance possesses precision and non-precision rockets and weapons capabilities,” Nasrallah said.

According to the Iranian terror group’s former head of security, Saudi intelligence helped fund the group by smuggling valuables like gold and Rolex watches into Iraq and Jordan for sale on the black market.

The Trump administration persuaded Volkswagen AG to comply with sanctions on Iran and end almost all of its business in the country, according to a U.S. official, a symbolically charged step in undercutting European Union efforts to keep the 2015 nuclear deal alive.

The U.S. and Volkswagen hammered out the final details on Tuesday after weeks of talks, according to U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, who led discussions with the Wolfsburg-based company. Volkswagen will still be allowed to do some business in Iran under a humanitarian exception, Grenell added.

President Trump on Friday went on the offensive in the battle over Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation after days of laying low, calling on accuser Christine Blasey Ford to provide a police report, slamming Democrats for waiting to share the allegations and telling senators to move ahead with a vote.

In a sharp change of tone after days of reserved statements regarding the allegations, the president unleashed a torrent of tweets, first in defense of Kavanaugh. He then put pressure on Ford to furnish a police report, though there’s no indication one was ever filed.

“I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents. I ask that she bring those filings forward so that we can learn date, time, and place!” he tweeted.

A U.S. Reaper drone shot down another with a missile, the Air Force revealed yesterday. The incident, which took place last year and involved an unmanned target drone, was the first case of a drone shooting down another another aircraft. The event ism a watershed moment in the history of aerial warfare, as unmanned aircraft begin to muscle in on air-to-air combat—previously the exclusive domain of manned aircraft.

Colonel Julian Cheater, commander of the 432nd Air Expeditionary Wing, revealed the incident in an interview with Military.com. The 432nd “Hunters” Wing is based at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada and is responsible for “unmanned precision attack and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions...in support of overseas contingency operations”.

Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser Christine Blasey Ford is getting advice by Democratic super-activist Ricki Seidman, Politico reports.

Seidman, currently an executive at a public relations company, has worked for the Dukakis, Mondale and Clinton campaigns for president. She served as Joe Biden’s communications director when he was named Barack Obama’s running mate in the 2008 election, and managed the confirmation of Obama’s Supreme Court justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor. Recently, Seidman served at the the executive director of the liberal voter turnout group Rock the Vote.

Seidman served in Bill Clinton’s campaign’s “war room” and served as deputy communications director in the Clinton White House, according to Politico.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) separated an auditor and socialist activist from his work at the agency while officials investigate “serious issues” raised by an undercover video by conservative activists.

Undercover agents from the conservative activist group Project Veritas filmed GAO auditor Natarajan Subramanian talking about his affiliation with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and admitting that he uses federal time to do DSA-related tasks. (RELATED: What Is The Deep State? )

“I break rules every day,” Subramanian says in the video. “At any point, I can get fired for stuff I do with DSA.”

“We are aware of the video and investigating the serious issues it raises, and we have also communicated with the GAO Inspector General,” GOA Office of Public Affairs managing director Chuck Young told The Daily Caller News Foundation in a statement. “The employee has been removed from any ongoing GAO work and cut off from access to GAO equipment.”

On the heels of the latest Israeli airstrikes against targets in Syria, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah gave a televised address, primarily talking about the group’s role and future in Syria.

Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah has said the party’s powerful military wing will not be pulling out of Syria once the Russia-Turkey brokered Idlib agreement comes into effect, saying Damascus still wants their assistance.

"We will stay there (in Syria) even after the settlement in Idlib. Our presence there is linked to the need and the consent of the Syrian leadership," Nasrallah said in an address broadcast on Lebanese media on Wednesday.

The Turkish Antimonopoly Committee decided to make Google pay a 93-million-lira fine (some $15 million) over breaches of competition legislation in the sphere of software for mobile phones, the committee said on Thursday in a statement.

"It was decided to fine the companies of Google, Google International and Google Reklamcilik that will have to pay 93 million Turkish liras over the violation of the legislation on competition in the sphere of sales of software for mobile phones. These companies must remove the violations within six months and restore the effective competition on the market," the statement said.

The Pentagon’s leadership has long opposed using body counts as war propaganda, particularly in Afghanistan, fearing that it would echo the failed strategy of Vietnam, and alienating people around the world.

But in recent months, efforts to sell President Trump on the Afghan War have changed that, with officials now eager to get gaudy death tolls out to the public to prove that the US and its allies will “remove all who oppose them at every turn,” and are making progress in killing people.

Yet these same officials have long admitted this isn’t an effective way to communicate how the war is going, and that fixation on body counts comes off as terribly morbid. Whether it is something to sell President Trump on the war is another matter.

Sanctions are worse than ineffective: they have potentially far-reaching economic impacts. Limiting Iran’s oil sales pushes up energy prices globally. Penalizing technology sales to Moscow disproportionately affects European firms. Even smaller markets matter. Warned Peter Harrell, an attorney specializing in sanctions: “Trump’s August 9 tariffs on Turkey spurred a dramatic market selloff that not only affected Ankara but also caused the stocks of major European banks with business in Turkey to plunge and raised concerns about contagion to other emerging markets.” Washington’s promiscuous use of economic sanctions has moved the global economy away from the liberal marketplace.

“Corporations should not be involved in any aspect of the democratic process. They should not be involved in education at any level. They should not be involved in health care. They should not be involved in the administration of social services. They should not be involved in the administration of justice. WHY? Because they are incapable of understanding and conforming to higher human aspirations and needs. Better to leave these areas to government, and to non-profit organizations, both of which are administered by humans in the human interest…The corporation is sociopathic in its disregard for human goals and values; in fact its behavior fits the World Health Organization’s criteria for defining the psychopath.” – Wade Rowland, author of Greed, Inc. Why Corporations Rule the World.

Each year, the USA finds a new country or group of countries to target with sanctions. Each year the USA adds about 1,000 individuals to its ever longer sanctions list. Now, US sanctions are coming to a turning point.

Up till now, the EU – representing around the same percentage of the world economy as the USA – was sitting put, as the USA grew its sanctions regime to ever more bizarre proportions. Together, the USA and the EU constituted nearly half of the world’s economy, and US sanctions previously “only” used to target the other half of the world’s economies. Hitherto, the EU had no compelling reasons to strain its relations with the USA because US sanctions do not affect them.

The term “deplatforming” is de rigueur at the moment, a creature of the social media age and lecture circuit. Invitations to writers’ festivals can be withdrawn at a moment’s notice because the invitee has either not observed the current fashion, or has done something distinctly against it. Users of social media have their carpet, or platform, as it were, taken from under them.

The star recipient of that treatment was Alex Jones, who has found himself, and his Infowars, expelled beyond the city gates of social media babble. Social media giants, pressured by the very individuals who believe that free speech is vital oxygen to the body politic, have taken it upon themselves to police expression.

“It’s implausible to imagine a future,” observed a bleak David Harsanyi, “in which liberal activists don’t demand that Republican groups be de-platformed.”

An implementation of the demilitarized zone agreement in Idlib reached during face-to-face talks between Russian and Turkish presidents on September 17 has appeared to be not a simple task as it has been pointed out by many experts.

On September 18, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda), the Islamic Turkistan Party, Jaish al-Izza and Hourras Addin refused to respect the agreement and to withdraw its forces and military equipment from the contact line.

On the same day, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu stated that work to establish a new security system in the Idlib de-escalation zone had started. He recalled that all heavy weapons have to be withdrawn from the demilitarized zone by October 10 and radical groups have to withdraw their forces by October 15.

“If the matter had been handled as it should have been, the Committee would have investigated the matter over the summer and resolved it privately to everyone’s satisfaction without the smearing of Kavanaugh and the dragging of the names of others into the public eye.”

“Bottom line: I believe that a fair assessment of this evidence powerfully supports Judge Kavanaugh’s categorical denial.”

This is Whelan’s theory on what happened, but it seems like it is very likely. This could be the evidence that puts an end to the Democrat’s stall tactic. As it seems everyone involved aside from Ford has no recollection of any event like that taking place with Kavanaugh.

Foreign mercenaries, trained covertly at secret IDF camps in the Negev desert, are now leading the new assault on the Yemen port city of Hodeida, an assault that observers warns threatens to dramatically worsen Yemen’s already catastrophic humanitarian crisis.

FRN proposed that one purely military-strategic aim of the French downing of the IL-20, ascribed falsely to Syria, was to see how Russia would ‘plug the gap’ created by not having an IL-20. This appears to be a procedure aimed at that.

In addition, Russia has also formally stated that their IFF system did not fail. However Russia is overtly implying that because the Russian-built Syrian S-200 system which both Russia and the West alleges was involved in the downing Russian IL-20 did not have Russian codes, the IFF question did not come into play.

The Arabic-language website of RT quoted Russian military expert Mikhail Khodarenok as saying on Wednesday that the French frigate named Auvergne has intentionally or unintentionally played a role in the incident.

He noted that the French vessel fired cruise missiles at Syrian targets concurrent with the incident, and said that it further complicated the conditions in the airspace of Syria's Southern coasts and created more problems for the Syrian air defense system by its deployment in an improper place and time.

The Russian military said an Il-20 electronic intelligence plane was hit 35km off Syria's Mediterranean coast as it returned to its home base nearby. All 15 Russian crew members were killed.

Russian defense officials described maneuvers by Israeli fighter jets during the incident as "hostile" and said it had a right to retaliate.

The Syrian army discovered a highly-equipped hospital which had been built with the support of the western states and Israel for the terrorists and their family members in Quneitra province.

The Arabic-language service of RT reported on Wednesday that the Syrian police forces entered the town of al-Bariqeh in Quneitra and took control of a hospital with modern equipment and medication.

It added that the hospital is equipped with different types of x-ray systems, an advanced central heating system, well-equipped beds and a surgery section and a vast storage drugs, including new and advanced medications needed for surgical operations.

A medical source said that a large number of Israeli, US and French equipment and drugs have been found in the hospital, saying that some of the medicines and equipment are not at all available to Syrian citizens.

THERESA May was plunged into a fresh Brexit crisis after the EU tore up her Chequers plan for a deal in front of her eyes.

The shell-shocked PM took an extraordinary and unexpected savaging from Europe’s leaders at the dramatic end of a summit in Salzburg.

A poll shows Germany's ruling coalition continuing to lose voter support, with the far-right AfD as the main beneficiary. And one conservative politician in particular seems to have lost the trust of the electorate.

Former CIA director and MSNBC contributor John Brennan called on FBI director Christopher Wray, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to "push back" on any directive from the White House that may have a "negative impact" on the Mueller investigation.

Brennan called on "individuals of conscience" in the administration to remember that they took an oath of office not an oath to Donald Trump. Moments prior Brennan admonished people who are abusing their powers to "protect" Trump.

"I think that they should continue to push, push, push, and if Mr. Tump and the White House does not relent, then they have some decisions to make, and whether or not they are going to the just not follow that direction and be fired or to resign," Brennan said of the trio.

A US state of war against North Korea has existed since Harry Truman’s aggression against the DPRK in the early 1950s.

Trump regime hardliners want no letup in US hostility toward the country, going all-out to prevent improved relations agreed on by DLT and Kim Jong-un during mid-June summit talks.

Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in support a formal end to the 1950s war. Following their Tuesday summit talks in Pyongyang, they signed a joint statement, proclaiming a state of war’s end, Moon’s spokesman saying:

“Leaders of the South and the North…announced the end of the war on the Korean Peninsula by their agreements.”

Hackers have been harnessing the computer processing power of YouTube viewers to mine cryptocurrencies. The malware attack, known as ‘cryptojacking’, was found to have targeted users through Google’s advertising service.

The issue first surfaced last week after social media users reported that YouTube ads were triggering their anti-virus software, according to Ars Technica. These ads were found to contain mining code called CoinHive that covertly used up to 80 percent of visitors’ central processing units to generate digital currency for anonymous hackers.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has authorized the addition of 33 Russian defense and intelligence officials and entities to the ever-growing US sanctions list and also targeted a Chinese military entity for buying Russian arms.

The Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) of 2017 instructs the US administration powers to target Russia, Iran and North Korea with various sanctions and restricts them from lifting previously imposed sanctions without congressional approval. Anyone dealing with those on the sanctions list faces at least a warning from the US as well.

In addition to extending the Russian blacklist to 72 entries, Washington has also targeted a Chinese military unit over the purchase of advanced Russian Su-35 fighter jets and S-400 surface-to-air missiles.

Poland's wish to host a US military base shows that the country, possessed by its resentment toward Russia, still "lives in illusion," Jean-Luc Schaffhauser, a member of the European Parliament and of French party National Rally (RN), told Sputnik.

US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday in a meeting with his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda that the United States was "considering" an establishment of a military base in Poland.

"The Poles live in an illusion, which has several times led them to positions detrimental to their nation… We must tell our Polish friends that this is enough and that Europe is not there to stir up conflicts and settle their past resentments or, even more seriously, their hatred of Russians," Schaffhauser said.

The ‘Israelis’ really done did it now, didn’t they? Flirting with WW3 like never before. After spending billions of dollars over the last several weeks across the Zionist media, telling the world that Baby-Seal-Clubbing, Puppy-Eating Assad was about to gas totally-vegan-completely-democratic-pro-LGBTQIA Al-Qaeda terrorists in Idlib–with chemical arms he doesn’t have, mind you–they were completely caught off-guard with a massive bombshell. Vladimir Putin had negotiated a demilitarization agreement with Neo-Ottoman “sultan” Erdogan, thus, at least in theory, averting a potential bloodbath in the last Takfiri-occupied city in Syria. The prospect of the war on the hardened Syrian battlefields finally being over proved too much for the voracious colonizers in “Tel Aviv”. They simply couldn’t bear seeing all of their miserable efforts, arming, training, financing and giving medical treatment to these Wahhabi mercenaries for nearly 8 years now being OFFICIALLY kaput.

Declaring that the manner in which Facebook has allowed its “false news” labeling policies to be applied to independent news organizations is contrary to the values embodied in the First Amendment, and is wholly inconsistent with standards of fairness and due process, The Rutherford Institute has come to the defense of The Free Thought Project, a news organization that has had several of its news stories wrongly labeled “false news” by Facebook.

Jaysh al-Izza, one of the biggest Free Syrian Army groups in northwestern Syria has welcomed an implementation of the de-escalation zone agreement in Idlib, which was reached by Turkey and Russia earlier this month, the pro-opposition media outlet Enab Baladi reported on August 20.

In a released statement, the group also thanked to Turkey for preventing a military operation by the Syrian Army and its allies in the province of Idlib and nearby areas.

Jaysh al-Izza, which operates in northwestern and northern Hama, is widely known for being one of the key allies of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda). This may be an indication that Turkey has enough influence and willingness on militant groups in the area to force them to obey the demilitarized zone agreement, which is set to be fully imposed by October 20. However, the situation remains complicated.

Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko wants to name a street in Kiev after the late Sen. John McCain.

"The Ukrainian president is asking the parliament's factions to support his initiative to rename the Ivan Kudrya street . . . after Senator John McCain," said Irina Lutsenko, an aide to Poroshenko, Russia's state-run media reported.

Ivan Kudrya was a Soviet intelligence officer who was executed by the Nazis in occupied Kiev in 1942. Poroshenko attended the funeral for McCain on Saturday.

McCain visited the Ukranian military on New Year's Eve 2016, in response to Russia's annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine.

"We stand w/ them in their fight against #Putin's aggression," McCain tweeted at the time.

Back in 1953, in the early months of the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration, the new president found himself in a political minefield related to his nomination of Charles E. (“Chip”) Bohlen to be U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. The unfolding political drama tells us something about how we used to do things in America as opposed to how we do them today. One example is President Trump’s nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to become a Supreme Court justice. Human nature having not changed, there were people of solid character back then as well as people of low character, the same as today. The big difference between the two situations lies in the level of political civility that reigned when politicians grappled with a potential scandal.

Scores of Israelis have entered the al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem under heavy escort from Israeli forces in past weeks.

Hundreds more forced their way into the compound in occupied East Jerusalem in recent days coinciding with the Jewish Yom Kippur holiday.

Firas al-Dibs, a spokesperson for the Islamic waqf, or foundation, that runs the compound, said that the frequent incursions by settlers who were praying openly were elevating tension at the holy site.

It’s hard to care for children as a single, unemployed parent. It’s almost impossible when official financial assistance is suddenly slashed in half.

This is what happened to Hazem Abu Kmail and his seven children. Since March, Abu Kmail, his four daughters and three sons have been hit by an apparent Palestinian Authority decision – officially denied – to cut allowances for Gaza families of prisoners associated with Hamas and Islamic Jihad held in Israeli jails.

The PA has officially denied yielding to pressure from Israel and the US to end what are stipends to help support the families of prisoners where typically the main breadwinner has been incarcerated.

At a weekly protest at the premises of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Gaza City where Abu Kmail and some dozen other families are protesting the conditions their loved ones are held in, Abu Kmail explained to The Electronic Intifada how the reduction in the PA stipend he receives has affected him.

Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser can’t remember what year the alleged ‘assault’ took place, whose party it took place at, or where specifically it (supposedly) happened. If such a thing did occur, those aspects would be seared into her memory crystal clear. She sounds mentally ill.

The newly-elected president of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), Zingiswa Losi, has called on the South African government to downgrade its relations with Israel, the Afro-Palestine Newswire Service has reported.

Losi, the first woman to lead the country’s largest trade federation, made the comments at COSATU’s 13th National Congress in Johannesburg yesterday. She praised the fact that South Africa had withdrawn its ambassador from Israel indefinitely, but also called on the African National Congress (ANC)-led government to be “decisive” and fully implement a resolution made at the ruling party’s December congress that called for the immediate and unconditional downgrade of the South African embassy in Tel Aviv to a liaison office.

Israeli authorities indicted a prominent Palestinian activist on Thursday on charges of “incitement to terrorism” and “expressing solidarity with a terrorist organisation”, reported Haaretz. The decision to indict was slammed as “political persecution” by The Higher Arab Monitoring Committee.

Haifa District Prosecutor’s Office also extended the detention of Raja Agbariyeh, a 66-year-old resident of Umm al-Fahm, until 2 October. He was first arrested on 11 September.

According to the indictment, “between July 2017 and July 2018, Agbariyeh published posts in which he expressed solidarity with a terrorist organization, incited and supported terrorism”.

In one of the Facebook posts cited in the indictment, Agbariyeh marked the one-year anniversary of a July 2017 shooting by three residents of Umm al-Fahm outside Al-Aqsa Mosque compound by wondering whether the incident brought “news of a new phase inside 1948”.

Israel’s critics often describe the country as being above the law, but until now this has never been brazenly declared by its government. Documents published this week shows a legal representative of the Israeli government audaciously claiming that Israel can “legislate anywhere in the world,” that it is “entitled to violate the sovereignty of foreign countries,” and that it “is allowed to ignore the directives of international law in any field it desires”.

The bold declaration was made in legal materials recently submitted to the Israeli Supreme Court in which the government representative said that the Knesset is allowed to ignore international law anywhere it desires.