Israel's Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Tuesday (April 24) that his country would attack Russian S-300 air defence systems in Syria if they were used against Israeli targets.

His remarks came a day after the Russian newspaper Kommersant reported that Moscow could soon start to deliver S-300 systems to its ally Damascus, and cited a source as warning of "catastrophic" consequences if they were attacked.

"What's important to us is that the defensive weapons the Russians are giving Syria won't be used against us," Mr Lieberman told the news website Ynet.

"If they're used against us, we'll act against them."

A local family has claimed that the Springfield Public School System is accessing their personal accounts and storing their private information on the system's Google Drive without their permission.

Springfield residents Norman and Diane Ely went before the school board earlier this year and asked that the district check into safety concerns regarding private information that was being stored on SPS's Google Drive. They claimed that since that meeting, nothing has changed.

Tuesday, the Ely's addressed the board again with more alarming discoveries.

Ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) admitted Tuesday that she “can’t say that everything is truthful” about the sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh brought forth by far-left activist Christine Ford.

Last Thursday, Senator Dianne Feinstein referred a mysterious letter about Kavanaugh to the FBI after holding onto it for months.

She started a firestorm by holding onto this letter about Kavanaugh then releasing it at the 11th hour in a “me too” ambush in an effort to delay Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

The Alaska Volcano Observatory is keeping watch on a remote volcano that's showing signs of erupting.

The observatory Monday increased the alert level from "advisory" to "watch" at Semisopochnoi in the Aleutian Islands.

The volcano is on an uninhabited island between Attu and Adak near the west end of the Aleutian chain.

The observatory detected elevated seismicity Sunday. Activity at Semisopochnoi intensified Monday afternoon.

By the time Lehman Brothers filed for the largest bankruptcy in American history on Sept. 15, 2008, the country had been navigating stormy global financial waters for more than a year. Bear Stearns had been rescued in a bailout-facilitated merger with JPMorgan Chase, and the government had nationalized housing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. For anyone paying attention to the financial system, the situation had been quite dire for a long time.

Al Jazeera's Investigative Unit has discovered that a self-deleting messaging app called Tiger Text has been adopted by at least one US police department, which may have used it to share sensitive and potentially incriminating information that they wouldn't want to be disclosed to a court.

Current and former officers from the Long Beach Police Department in Southern California have told Al Jazeera that their police-issued phones had Tiger Text installed on them.

The Tiger Text app is designed to erase text messages after a set time period. Once the messages have been deleted, they cannot be retrieved - even through forensic analysis of the phone.

Should Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court fail because of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations, a new nominee likely cannot be confirmed before the end of the year.

Recent high court nominations were processed over a 67-day span, and there is little time left to move on a confirmation in the current Congress.
Should Democrats take control of the upper chamber, there could be a vacancy on the high court for years.

Ralph Blasey III, Christine Ford’s brother was formerly employed at the D.C. offices of Baker & Hostetler LLP. That’s the same firm that made payments over over half a million dollars to Fusion GPS.

Ralph Blasey III left Baker & Hostetler LLP in 2004. Still, its’ just another rather odd twist to the case of the accuser of Brett Kavanaugh. First it was revealed Ford is a far left, Northern California professor. Then last night it was revealed that Brett Kavanugh’s mother, a Maryland district judge in the 1990’s foreclosure case against Christine Ford’s parents.

The world once again was taken to the brink of World War 3 Monday night, and the situation is still extremely dangerous. A massive wide-ranging assault on multiple Syrian provinces, including the coastal cities of Latakia and Tartus, occurred Monday evening reportedly by Israel and possibly with the help of France or the US, though the Pentagon is denying any US assistance during the assault.

With Syrian and Russian air defenses responding during the over hour-long attack which targeted among other things an alleged chemical weapons research center, and in the confusion of missiles cross the sky, a Russian maritime patrol plane was shot down with 14 personnel on board. The Pentagon is claiming it was Syrian defense which "accidentally" downed the plane, while Russia is pointing out its radar observed a French frigate firing in the area just before the plane went down.

A group of over 40 Congress members have sent President Trump a bipartisan letter reminding him that the US Constitution requires that the president seek Congressional approval before taking military action in Syria or elsewhere. Congressman Justin Amash (R-Mich.) announced via Twitter on Monday that the letter had been sent to the White House.

Ironically Rep. Amash made the announcement just as Monday's evening's massive Israeli strike on Syria was underway, which resulted in a downed Russian surveillance plane carrying 14 troops amidst the confusion of missiles flying over the Mediterranean as it was hit by Syrian defense attempting to stave off the attack by Israel.

After the Syrians accidentally targeted a Russian surveillance aircraft over the Mediterranean and the Russians pinned the blame on Israel, the corporate propaganda media scrambled to spin the story.

The Pentagon and State Department directed media insinuate the tragedy was the fault of the Russians, who got in the way of yet another—there are hundreds—illegal Israeli attack on Syria. The illegality of these persistent attacks on Syrian sovereignty is rarely if ever pointed out by the national security state’s scribes and teleprompter readers.

Here is what these lackluster careerists in service to the state ignore: the Israelis used the Russian aircraft as cover.

“The Israeli pilots used the Russian plane as cover and set it up to be targeted by the Syrian air defense forces. As a consequence, the Il-20, which has radar cross-section much larger than the F-16, was shot down by an S-200 system missile,” a spokesman for the Russian Ministry of Defense said in a statement.

The US research agency Stratfor has forecast that “the United States will solidify its naval presence in the South China Sea and continue building up defence and economic ties along China's periphery from Taiwan to Southeast Asia,” and given the all-embracing belligerence that seems to envelope Washington, its analysts are probably right. There are few countries or international accords that are not targeted by the malevolence of a president who declared at his inauguration that “it’s going to be only America first, America first” and whose disciples applaud his erratic lurches from truculent insults to maudlin self-pity.

Earlier, local police cordoned off streets in Salisbury and an Italian restaurant as a "precautionary measure" after a man and woman fell ill amid reports of "possible nerve agent poisoning." At least one of the patients was thought to be Russian.

Following medical tests, UK police announced that the two people who recently became ill in Salisbury had not been poisoned by a nerve agent, despite initial reports suggesting that the couple’s symptoms were “consistent with Novichok poisoning.”

"Tests have confirmed that the two patients who fell ill in Prezzo restaurant in Salisbury on Sunday evening were not exposed to any kind of nerve agent. Following test results, at this stage, this is not being treated as suspicious," the Salisbury police said in its Twitter blog.

As YouTube, Google, and Twitter crack down on peaceful channels, censor alternative media, and allow child exploitation videos to flourish, New Mexico has filed a lawsuit against them and several app developers for illegally collecting data from children under the age of 13 without parental consent.

According to UPI, New Mexico Attorney General Balderas said the companies are violating the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a federal law, by collecting and selling the data on children.

“These apps can track where children live, play, and go to school with incredible precision,” Balderas said of the insidious practice. “These multi-million-dollar tech companies partnering with app developers are taking advantage of New Mexican children, and the unacceptable risk of data breach and access from third parties who seek to exploit and harm our children will not be tolerated in New Mexico.”

Senate Democrats are pure evil, but like the devil no one will deny that they are smart. At the 12th hour they have succeeded in throwing a monkey wrench into the confirmation of Supreme Court candidate Brett Kavanaugh by having a woman, Christine Blasey Ford, who they extracted from the woodwork to accuse this Republican establishment jurist of attempted rape while he was 17 years old and in high school, almost 40 years ago! Sound familiar?

Flight AI-101 Captain Rustom Palia went on to described how there was only one radioaltimeter functioning and the Traffic Collision and Avoidance System had failed.

In a stomach-twisting account of the technical faults they were facing, Palia added that there was “no Auto-land, no wind-shear systems, [no] Auto Speed Brake, and the Auxiliary Power Unit is unserviceable as well.”

Prospects became even bleaker when the pilots discovered they couldn't even rely on the automatic landing system, namely the Instrument Landing System (ILS) receivers.

These are crucial for a plane landing on the right path in bad weather, which the Boeing 777-300 was in the process of doing that day.

“Basically, we've got a single source radio altimeter, we have a Traffic Collision and Avoidance System failure,” the commander of Air India 777-300 reported to Air Traffic Control in New York via radio.

Senate Republicans gave into the Democrats by agreeing to hear Ford’s case, which was first leveled in July in a letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein but was only recently brought up. By entertaining her curiously-timed claims, Republicans rewarded Sen. Feinstein for deliberately withholding evidence until a politically opportune time. Now, Republicans have set up a committee hearing to actually hear Ford out.

This plays right into the Democrats’ hands. And it just became obvious with the statement Feinstein’s office just released, which gives the entire game away.

This isn’t Feinstein’s first act of trickery. Earlier this week, she refused to attend a phone call with Kavanaugh that was held by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. That was the first sign that Democrats aren’t actually serious about hearing from Ford.

The “breakthrough” seems to have come from a JIT briefing last May, which produced fragments of the engine and nozzle of the 9M38 missile, launched by a Buk missile system, which downed MH17. According to Parshin: “Once we had the nozzle and engine numbers, we were able to find out the missile’s number.”

So now we know, via declassified files, that the engine of the missile 9D131 allegedly had the serial number 8869032. And a “passport” for the nozzle cluster 9D13105000 carried the number 8-30-113. The actual missile number was 886847349, they said.

The Defense Ministry established that numbers for the components of the 9M38 missile and the number of units noted in the technical documentation stored at the Dolgoprudny Research and Production Enterprise, outside Moscow, are the same.

I have been following the latest outrage of the last three days. Apparently, Brett Kavanaugh pulled a girls ponytail at the playground when he was 9 or something to that effect, and everyone on the left is losing their minds. I’m not going to analyze the myriad of ways that this accusation makes no sense (notably timing, inconsistencies, age of people involved, and other things that came up).

My point is different in nature and the observation is more general.

The United States is in a civil war in every way short of using arms. The institutions won’t save us any more because they no longer mean anything. There are two sides which are equally unchangeable in their minds. Both sides are not driven by the same principles (you can call it a fight between “idealism” vs “realism” to give them both credit but that is giving the one side a little too much credit I guess) but in principle both sides are largely unmoved in their beliefs and direction.

The Russian military has pinpointed the location where the Ilyushin-20 aircraft fell into the Mediterranean, the Russian Defense Ministry told the media on Tuesday.

"Taking part in the search for the crew of the Russian Ilyushin-20 plane, which crashed off Latakia, are eight ships and boats from Russia’s Navy. By now, the aircraft’s crash site in the Mediterranean has been identified. It’s 27 kilometers west of Baniyas, in the Latakia province," the Defense Ministry said.

Russian ships have picked up body fragments, personal belongings and the plane’s debris.

Weiss identifies Klarman as “hawkish, socially liberal, fiscally conservative.” His and his wife’s family foundation focuses on “pro-democracy initiatives, including supporting organizations that protect journalists, combat bigotry and defend L.G.B.T. rights.”

That’s not the whole story. Israel is never mentioned in the article, but Israel is clearly at the heart of Klarman’s giving. Klarman started a newspaper in Israel, the Times of Israel, and has given to a host of neoconservative Israel lobby organizations, including Trump’s favorite thinktank, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the Israel Project, Middle East Forum, WINEP and the David Project, which tried to block construction of mosques in Klarman’s city, Boston.

Klarman is plainly ideological. He also funds CAMERA, a rightwing media outfit that puts out regular critiques of the New York Times. Klarman gave more than $1.5 million to CAMERA through that foundation that works to “protect journalists.”

The mask is off. The US as an extremely biased arbiter in the Israel-Palestinian conflict has fully revealed itself.

In the ignoble Deal of the Century, Palestinians are told – your national aspirations are nothing. Right of return, refugee status, East Jerusalem as a capital and UNWRA aid from the US are gone. So is your mission in Washington. If you complain of our, or Israel’s, behavior to the International Criminal Court, the court itself will be sanctioned and its members prosecuted should they enter the United States.

When this ‘peacemaker’ strips Palestinians of negotiating bargaining chips, it’s no surprise that Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas refuses to sit at the table. The table is rigged to protect the bicycle thief; the victim cannot allude to getting their bike back nor even to the fact that it was stolen.

Former Israeli prime minister and defence minister, Ehud Barak was accused by the Israeli Likud of inciting to kill current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on Sunday.

Barak accused Netanyahu of leading Israel “to destruction through an extreme, messianic and racist minority,” calling for the Israelis to defend their country.

He compared Netanyahu’s government, Haaretz said, “to the era of the rule of Romanian Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who was executed along with his wife in 1989.”

During a meeting in Tel Aviv, Barak added: “The moral collapse of Netanyahu has begotten laws whose only purpose is to help the government escape the corruption, bribery and breach of trust affairs it is suspected in.”

An Israeli company is set to invest about $50 million in a weapons factory in the Philippines next year, Filipino media reports have revealed.

The Philippine News Agency reported that the Israeli firm Silver Shadow Advanced Security Systems Ltd (SSASS) signed a memorandum of understanding with the Philippines Rayo Illuminar Corporation (RIC) to open the factory that will be operational by next year.

According to the news agency, Salvador Zamora, chairman of Filipino Rayo Illuminar Corporation, said that officials from Israeli SSASS would visit the Philippines later this month to finalise plans for an assembly plant slated to start producing firebombs and ammunition by 2019.

The Jerusalem Post said that “Israel and the Philippines maintain close security ties, with Israel selling a large amount of weaponry to the Philippine army over the years.”

Russia Provides Conclusive Proof That Ukraine Downed Malaysia Airlines MH17

Of course, proof, facts, evidence are no longer of any consequence in the Western World. Transparently false accusations can be leveled without any evidence provided, and the lie becomes a fact. “Russiagate” is a perfect example.

Feminist students in Western universities, who find themselves “offended” by scientific fact, denounce scientists for speaking truth that contradicts feminist ideology, and the university administrations, obedient to feminish ideology, haul the scientists before hearings ideologically prepared to declare the scientist, if male, a misogynist. https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/09/17/feminist-ideology-is-incon...

History is rewritten into fantasy because the historical facts are “offensive” to one “victim group” or the other. Identity politics has birthed a new world: history is whatever serves agendas. Nothing else counts. Truth least of all.

In a rare admission, Israel has broken its “no-comment” policy on air strikes to confirm that it has carried out over 200 attacks against Iranian targets in Syria over the last two years. In addition to those attacks, a new report claims that Israel has secretly armed and funded at least 12 Syrian rebel groups in southern Syria since 2013. Israel reportedly stopped its transfer of weapons and money in July, after the Bashar al-Assad regime regained control of the Syrian side of the Golan Heights.

The major purpose of Israel’s “Operation Good Neighbor,” which reportedly included humanitarian aid to Syrian rebels, was to prevent Iran-affiliated forces from entrenching their position near Israeli borders. More important, however, is the fact that Israel has intensified and broadened its air campaign inside Syria in recent months to target Iranian positions.

As the row over what constitutes anti-Semitism rages in Britain, the very real fear that freedom of speech is being threatened has already been realised in America, according to one Jewish campaign group. At the heart of the argument is a decision by the Trump administration to change how the Education Department investigates allegations that Jewish students face discrimination; not surprisingly, the Trump team has backed an approach that is endorsed by pro-Israel groups.

The policy change has already prompted the reinvestigation of an event held seven years ago, involving Holocaust and Nakba survivors, which was deemed to be anti-Semitic because it included criticism of the Israeli government. The reopening of the 2011 case, dismissed under the Obama administration, means that anyone who supports Palestinian human rights is potentially going to be regarded as an anti-Semite, says Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP).

Russian President Vladimir Putin is reviled as an enemy of the West in general, and of the EU in particular, and yet Hungarian Prime Minister Orban continues to conduct “business as usual” with the master of the Kremlin.

The “salon des refusés” of political dissidents in the EU is getting bigger by the day. Less than a week after his government was condemned in a vote in the European parliament, Orban is in Moscow for talks about energy with Putin. His visit to Russia is the political equivalent of giving the EU the finger following last week’s humiliation.

The Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has asked Russia to extend the Turkish Stream natural gas pipeline to his country and further into Europe.
Orban, who is on a visit to Moscow, broached this potential project during a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday. "It's no secret that Hungary wants the pipeline that's being built near the south of the country, to go through Hungary,” Orban said. The countries have also agreed a gas delivery service from Russia to Hungary for 2020.

The Russian Hmeymim airbase had lost contact with the crew of the Russian Il-20 military aircraft late on Monday during the attack of four Israeli F-16 aircraft on Syrian targets in the province of Latakia.

"Our reconnaissance Il-20 aircraft with a crew of 15 on board was carrying out a reconnaissance mission over the Idlib de-escalation zone to determine the locations of storage and collection of unmanned aerial vehicles that fly out of the zone and strike different areas of Syria," Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu stated at a meeting with senior military commanders.

Israeli F-16 jets attacked Syria under the cover of the Russian Il-20, assuming that the Syrian air defense forces would not act in this direction, Shoigu said.

Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) said the Democrats could keep Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court seat vacant for two years if need be should the nomination fail and should Democrats take the Senate in November.

Hirono said if a replacement for Kavanaugh needed to be found, President Trump should nominate a less conservative ideologue, or else be ready for Senate Democrats to keep the court seat vacant until after the 2020 presidential election if they win the chamber in November, according to an interview with Politico Magazine.

“I think we’ve had those kinds of vacancies before, and we certainly had over a one-year vacancy with Merrick Garland,” Hirono told Politico. “So the world does not come to an end because we don’t fill all of the nominees.”

Russia will respond to actions on behalf of the Israeli Air Force that led to a fatal crash of Russia’s Il-20 aircraft on Monday late night in Syria, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Tuesday. “We have informed today our Israeli colleagues, and I have also informed personally the Israeli Defense Minister [Avigdor Lieberman], that such actions will not be left unanswered by us,” Shoigu said, reported Russian state news agency TASS.

During their final days of access to FBI files and computers Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok — before losing their jobs — each allegedly tried to destroy evidence and documents, per well-placed FBI and DOJ sources.

But they were nabbed by a sting operation.

Two of the supposed brightest minds who served the FBI — and led the country’s Intel apparatus — each separately set out to allegedly destroy incriminating evidence before their departures from the Bureau. And neither one had any clue they were being watched.

Without the emergence of new evidence, we will never know if Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation against Brett Kavanaugh is true or not. And there’s nothing Kavanaugh can do or say that will clear his name. If you’re a man, a single uncorroborated account that dates back to 1982 is all your political critics need to accuse you of attempted rape.

On Saturday morning, CNN reports that National Weather Service forecast flood waters on Cape Fear River in Wilmington N.C. to crest at 60 feet (sixty feet) early next week. Wilmington is near Southport, home of two reactor Brunswick nuclear plant on the Cape Fear River in North Carolina. The nuclear plant has a sea wall designed to withstand 22 feet of flooding according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. On Saturday morning the river gage on Cape Fear River in Wilmington had reached 16 feet with forecast of rising rapidly to an astounding record sixty feet of flood crest early next week.

Heavy downpours continue as Florence moves very slowly to the south west. The wide Cape Fear River is a major channel for flood water runoff to reach the ocean.

Dozens of Israeli settlers stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound on Monday, and performed religious Jewish prayers under the protection of heavily armed Israeli forces.

Spokesman for the Islamic Endowment department (Waqf), Firas al-Dibs, said that dozens of Israeli settlers stormed the compound through the Moroccan Gate in successive groups.

Al-Dibs added, according to Ma’an, that many of the Israeli settlers performed religious Jewish prayers on the occasion of the upcoming Jewish holidays.

Israeli settlers have called for increased visits to the compound, to perform rituals, due to Israel’s Yom Kippur also known as the Day of Atonement, one of the most sacred holidays in Judaism, which starts at sunset, on Tuesday, and ends at sunset, on Wednesday.

Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak has censured his successor Benjamin Netanyahu for passing corrupt legislation, comparing him to Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who was overthrown and killed in 1989.

“The moral collapse of Netanyahu has begotten laws whose only purpose is to help the government escape the corruption, bribery and breach of trust affairs it is suspected in,” Barak said at a speech in Tel Aviv, Sunday.

Barak hinted that Netanyahu would face the same fate of Ceausescu, who ruled over Romania with an iron grip, from 1965 until he was overthrown after mass protests against him. He was executed in the same year, along with his wife Elena.

In press releases published yesterday, September 16, 2018, Dr. Saeeb Erekat said that the Sabra and Shatila Massacre is a reminder of Israel’s barbaric crimes.

Erekat added, according to the PNN, that the massacre of Sabra and Shatila is not only a reminder of the barbaric crimes committed against the Palestinian people. but, overall, it highlights the effects of the impunity granted to Israel and its officials by the international community.

The main responsibility of the massacre fell on Ariel Sharon, who was also responsible for many other war crimes committed against the people of Palestine. Sharon died without being held accountable, Erekat said.

A busload of IDF soldiers clashed with Palestinians at the Kalandia refugee camp in the West Bank after the vehicle entered the camp, allegedly by accident. At least three soldiers were injured in the clash, the IDF confirmed.

Palestinians reportedly started throwing stones at the Israeli vehicle after it drove inside the camp, which is located between Jerusalem and Ramallah. At least one female officer was lightly injured by a stone, Jerusalem Post reported. The outlet added that the "rescue of the soldiers" was underway.

Hans-Georg Maassen has been removed as the head of Germany's domestic intelligence agency and will become a senior official in the interior ministry. That's after he questioned videos of far-right violence in Chemnitz.

The move is being seen as a compromise between the Social Democrats, who had demanded Maasen's removal, and conservative Interior Minister Horst Seehofer.

It comes after he cast doubt on the authenticity of a video showing far-right protesters chasing migrants after the fatal stabbing of a German man by migrants in the city of Chemnitz.

Or is it a dead feminist, homosexual, transgendered walking zombie?

Given the title of the article, Goldberg inevitably turns to the holocaust with McCain: “He said that, in the post holocaust world, all civilized people, and the governments of all civilized nations, should be intolerant of leaders who commit verified acts of genocide… I told him then that he would most definitely pass the Anne Frank test…[which] is actually a single question: ‘Which non-Jewish friends would risk their lives to hide us should the Nazis ever return?’”

After some additional blather Goldberg enthuses that he was “…pretty sure [McCain would] kill Nazis to defend Anne Frank.” McCain smiled and responded “It would be an honor and a privilege.”

CNN recently discovered a paradox. How was it possible, they asked, that in 1989, Viktor Orban, at the time a Western-acclaimed liberal opposition leader, was calling for Soviet troops to leave Hungary, and now that he is Prime Minister, he is cozying up to Vladimir Putin?

For the same reason, dummy.

Orban wanted his country to be independent then, and he wants it to be independent now.

In 1989, Hungary was a satellite of the Soviet Union. Whatever Hungarians wanted, they had to follow directives from Moscow and adhere to Soviet communist ideology.

Today, Hungary is ordered to follow directives from Brussels and adhere to the EU ideology, a k a “our common values”.

North and West Africa have seen intense U.S. military engagement over the last decade. America has, as The Intercept reported earlier this year, conducted approximately 550 drone strikes in Libya since 2011 — more than in Somalia, Yemen, or Pakistan. In July, Politico disclosed that for at least five years, Green Berets, Navy SEALs, and other commandos — operating under a little-understood budgetary authority known as Section 127e — have been involved in reconnaissance and “direct action” combat raids with local forces in Cameroon, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Tunisia. Between 2015 and 2017, there were also at least 10 previously unreported attacks on American troops in West Africa, the New York Times revealed in March. Last October, four U.S. troops were killed in an ISIS ambush in Niger. Two months later, Green Berets fighting alongside local forces in that same country reportedly killed 11 ISIS militants.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., has asked the Department of Justice to investigate whether former Secretary of State John Kerry broke the law by meeting with the Iranian foreign minister after President Trump took office.

Rubio said in a Tuesday letter to the department that the “American people deserve to know what U.S. laws are enforced regardless of any individual’s past position.”

The Florida senator said the Justice Department should decide whether the former Obama official violated the Logan Act, a more than 200-year-old law that prohibits private citizens from acting on behalf of the U.S. in negotiations with foreign governments without authorization, or the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a law requiring people or companies acting on behalf of a foreign entity to disclose their work to the U.S. government.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley on Tuesday raised the possibility that next week’s high-stakes open hearing to examine the sexual assault allegation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh could be canceled if the accuser doesn’t accept the committee’s invitation.

Grassley, R-Iowa, scheduled a hearing for Monday for Kavanaugh and accuser Christine Blasey Ford to answer questions from senators about the allegation. But Grassley said during a Tuesday radio interview that his office has reached out several times to Ford and her attorneys to discuss her allegation, but has heard nothing back.

Update 4: The Russian Ministry of Defense cleared up the confusion surrounding the overnight downing of a Russian Ilyushin-20 reconnaissance plane on Tuesday when a spokesman revealed that Israel was indeed responsible for the attack, which resulted in the deaths of 15 Russian servicemen.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the plane was accidentally brought down by an aging Syrian S-200 defense system after Russia had scrambled its jets to respond to an attack by four Israeli F-16s on Syrian government targets. Israeli notified Russia of its attack over a shared hotline less than a minute before beginning the strike, giving the Kremlin little time to respond.

"As a result of the Israeli military’s irresponsible actions 15 Russian servicemen died," said Defense Ministry Spokesman Gen. Igor Konashenkov.

Israel has carried out roughly 200 strikes in Syria over the past year and a half as it pushes back against Tehran's growing presence in the war-torn battle zone.