Iran’s ambassador in London warned on Sunday that the UK government must get its "domestic political forces" pushing for regime change under control or else the two countries will face dangerous escalation. The public statement came two days after the British-flagged Stena Impero was boarded and captured by IRGC commandos, and over two weeks after the tanker Grace 1 was seized by UK Royal Marines off Gibraltar.

Iranian Ambassador Hamid Baeidinejad urged via his personal Twitter account that continued pressure on Iran would be "unwise" given that Tehran stands “firm and ready for different scenarios”.

A report published Friday by the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA), an organization funded by the government of South Korea, showed that North Korea’s trade volume was cut in half during 2018, evidently as a result of sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council.
The KOTRA report showed North Korea’s trade volume falling to $2.84 billion in 2018, a 48.8 percent decline from the previous year. Exports fell by a dizzying 86.3 percent, imports declined 31.2 percent, and the North Korean trade deficit rose by 17.5 percent.

The Korea Times cited the specific U.N. Security Council resolutions that appeared to deflate North Korea’s trade volume so sharply, saying:

A Palestinian protester uses a slingshot to hurl stones at Israeli troops during clashes on the Gaza-Israel border, east of Gaza City, July 19, 2019. At least 74 Palestinians were injured on Friday during clashes with Israeli soldiers stationed on the border between eastern Gaza Strip and Israel, medics said. (Str/Xinhua)

GAZA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- A total of 74 Palestinian demonstrators were injured during clashes with Israeli soldiers in the eastern Gaza Strip on Friday, the Health Ministry in Gaza said.

Among the injured were two journalists and four field paramedics, a ministry report said, adding 36 were injured by Israeli soldiers' gunfire.

According to local media, around 6,000 demonstrators gathered on Friday afternoon in eastern Gaza close to the border with Israel.

It was the 67th weekly anti-Israel protest, better known as the Great March of Return rally which started in late March last year.

Palestinians on Friday converged near the fence that separates Gaza Strip from Israel, to demonstrate against Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian territories, Anadolu Agency reports.

Gaza’s National Authority for Return and Breaking the Siege (NARBS), which organises weekly rallies, called on Palestinians to attend demonstration and affirm on their right to return to their villages in historical Palestine.

Earlier on Friday, the NARBS warned Israel against any “escalation” against the Palestinian peaceful protestors.

New information is surfacing to suggest that the unsolved murder of Arkansas Senator Linda Collins-Smith may be connected to the public unveiling of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his child sex trafficking ring.

While the details are still forthcoming, CD Media is reporting that a “confidential source that has been accurate consistently” recently came forward with proof tying Collins-Smith’s mysterious death to her involvement with blowing the lid off an alleged child sex trafficking ring in Arkansas.

Collins-Smith, a Republican, had also been working to expose “massive corruption in the local and state government” in Arkansas, which suggests that she may have been “Arkancided” for getting a little bit too close to the truth.

Iranian authorities say the British oil tanker seized in the Strait of Hormuz was involved in an accident with an Iranian fishing boat and ignored its distress call before capture.

Allah-Morad Afifipoor, head of Ports and Maritime Organization in southern Hormozgan Province, said on Saturday that the 30,000-tonne UK-flagged Stena Impero tanker had "collided with a fishing boat on its route and, according to law, after an accident it is necessary that the causes are investigated."

Following the collision, those on board the fishing boat "contacted the British vessel but didn't receive any response," so they informed the Hormozgan maritime organization "according to the legal procedures," he added.

Afifipoor also noted that the tanker had been taken to Bandar Abbas port, where it and its crew will remain while a probe is carried out into the British vessel’s conduct.

An Iranian oil tanker, held by Saudi Arabia two months ago, has reportedly been released and is returning home with the entire crew.

Reports said Saturday that the oil tanker, named Happiness I, had been released and was heading towards Iran’s waters.

There was no immediate confirmation from Saudi or Iranian authorities.

Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps has released footage captured by an Iranian drone monitoring a United States Navy vessel in the Persian Gulf. The video belies a claim by Washington that the unmanned aircraft was shot down by the American forces.

The number of people infected with Ebola continues to rise steadily in the Democratic Republic of the Congo's (DRC's) outbreak zone, according to reports yesterday and today, with one more healthcare worker sickened by the virus and the outbreak total rising to 2,546 cases.

At least eight families say they donated their loved ones bodies to the facility for medical research, but are now suing the company and its owner, Stephen Gore, for mishandling their corpses, and failing to meet the promises made in their consent forms.

A defiant Turkey said it was considering “alternatives” to US fighter jets, including Russian models or making its own, a day after Washington suspended it from a programme to build and deploy advanced warplanes.

The US punished Turkey for its purchase of a Russian air defence system by pushing it out of a long-term programme to upgrade Nato forces with F-35 advanced fighter jets.

The Kremlin quickly attempted to exploit the disagreement, which has already drawn Ankara closer to Moscow, offering to sell Turkey Russian fighter planes.

Ismail Demir, head of Turkey’s defence industries, responded that “all kinds of options are on the table,” according to the official Anadolu news agency.

“Turkey will continue to evaluate alternatives,” he said.

London was reportedly getting set to impose new sanctions on Iran Saturday, as European powers urged Tehran to release a British-flagged tanker it seized in the Strait of Hormuz.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said it seized the Stena Impero Friday for breaking “international maritime rules” in the strait, a choke-point for around a third of the world’s sea-borne oil.

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Lawmakers in New Jersey have introduced an antisemitism bill that would prohibit certain criticism of Israel in public schools and universities. The proposed legislation comes on the heels of similar bills being passed in South Carolina and Florida. Last year, the Department of Education adopted a new definition of antisemitism to include criticism of Israel.

SB 4001 was introduced on June 24 by Senate President Stephen Sweeney and Sen. Robert Singer. It aims to ensure that antisemitism is treated the same way as other forms of discrimination by amending state law. However, the bill equates criticism of Israel with antisemitism in a number of places including:

-[D]emonizing Israel by using the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism to characterize Israel or Israeli people, drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, or blaming Israel for all interreligious or political tensions;

The role Australia played in relaying the first television images of astronaut Neil Armstrong’s historic walk on the Moon 50 years ago this July features in the popular movie The Dish.

But that only tells part of the story (with some fictionalisation as well).

What really happened is just as dramatic as the movie, and needed two Australian dishes. Australia actually played host to more NASA tracking stations than any other country outside the United States.

Now a new JCS chairman is about to take office. Compared with the headlines generated by the “squad” of House progressives who have attracted the ire of both Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Donald Trump, the process of installing General Mark Milley in this once-important post has received negligible attention.

It would be useful to know if General Milley’s grasp of war has advanced beyond Colonel Milley’s.

Ehud Barak, who defeated Benjamin Netanyahu in a 1999 election to become Israel's prime minister, has been linked to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Less than three weeks after announcing that he will come out of political retirement to challenge Benjamin Netanyahu for prime minister in the upcoming Israeli elections, as YNet News reported, former prime minister Ehud Barak is facing allegations that he is financially tied to convicted sex offender and shadowy financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to a sexual offense with a 14-year-old girl, and was arrested again on July 6 on new sex trafficking charges. Barak, a former lieutenant general in Israel’s army, served as Israel’s 10th prime minister from 1999 to 2001, after defeating Netanyahu, who was then serving his first term as Israeli PM.

The man accused of telling a black Democrat representative to “go back to where you came from” has told his side of the story and says the accusations are not true.

Eric Sparkes, who said he is a Democrat and is Cuban, said that the two did have a confrontation and he called her a “b*tch” but he did not say what Rep. Erica Thomas said he did.

“That’s all I said after that, and I walked out of Publix,” Sparkes said. “Her words stating on [Facebook] in her video, stating I told her she needs to go back where she came from are untrue.”

Over the last several months, cities and counties across California have been releasing homeless counts. The results have been grim.

San Francisco was no exception. In May, the city released data that showed homelessness had jumped 17%. That was bad enough. Last week, a more complete accounting, known as a point-in-time count, showed the problem was even worse.

The count revealed that homelessness in a city that’s become a caricature of wealth inequality in the U.S. had actually increased by about 30% from 2017, when the last count took place.

Has the truth movement been infiltrated? That is the question explored in the following. In general, the question drew us toward the truth, in all respects, not the rigid answers that have been accepted and pushed blindly by the masses.

Likely, if you are reading these words, you are a truth rebel, you dare to question the status quo. Shining our light into all the darkness, even within ourselves, is the hardest task, but one with the greatest potential for making ourselves and the world a better place. Shall we begin?

How important is the truth? What power does it have to make our lives better? Can it make us happier, more fulfilled?

For most, the answer is yes — and no.

Just in case we haven’t provided you with enough creepy dystopian news lately, the nation’s leader in Creepy Dystopia, California, has a brand new program. The “Cradle to Career Data System” will study and document everything about a child born in the state.

But don’t worry, it’s for your children’s own good.

A new study, published in Psychiatry Research, has concluded that psychiatric diagnoses are scientifically worthless as tools to identify discrete mental health disorders.

The study, led by researchers from the University of Liverpool, involved a detailed analysis of five key chapters of the latest edition of the widely used Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), on 'schizophrenia', 'bipolar disorder', 'depressive disorders', 'anxiety disorders' and 'trauma-related disorders'.

Diagnostic manuals such as the DSM were created to provide a common diagnostic language for mental health professionals and attempt to provide a definitive list of mental health problems, including their symptoms.

SOURCE: ZDNET.COM
Hackers have breached SyTech, a contractor for FSB, Russia's national intelligence service, from where they stole information about internal projects the company was working on behalf of the agency -- including one for deanonymizing Tor traffic.

The breach took place last weekend, on July 13, when a group of hackers going by the name of 0v1ru$ hacked into SyTech's Active Directory server from where they gained access to the company's entire IT network, including a JIRA instance.

Hackers stole 7.5TB of data from the contractor's network, and they defaced the company's website with a "yoba face," an emoji popular with Russian users that stands for "trolling."

Hackers posted screenshots of the company's servers on Twitter and later shared the stolen data with Digital Revolution, another hacking group who last year breached Quantum, another FSB contractor.

Iran has been told it should prepare to be hit by a range of UK sanctions in the aftermath of its seizure of a British-flagged oil tanker in the Gulf, according to media reports.

Iran responded by warning the UK to refrain from any “dangerous and unwise” moves against the Islamic republic.

British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt is expected to announce on Sunday diplomatic and economic measures, including potential asset freezes, as a response to the incident, according to a report in the London Daily Telegraph.

Media reports of an impending Israeli war on the besieged Gaza Strip are now a regular occurrence. The frequency of these reports fluctuates based on Israel’s own political landscape.

Empirical experience has taught us that when Israeli leaders are in trouble, they wage a war on Gaza. Now that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing the greatest challenge in his political career, Gaza is bracing for another Israeli war.

The war rumors are no longer just that. Rightwing Israeli newspaper, The Jerusalem Post recently reported that Israel’s military chief of staff, Lieutenant-General Aviv Kochavi, “has already approved operational combat plans and recently set up an administrative unit to handle the formation of a list of potential targets in the coastal enclave for when the next war breaks out.”

On Thursday David Steinberg published an extensive report on the alleged crimes and history of Rep. Ilhan Omar and the “Omar” family.
In his report David found that the Omar family changed their name in order to enter the United States.

British female holiday-goers in Aiya Napa tell the Daily Mail, tourists from Israel, most in their late teens, pester them for sex; victim of the alleged rape said the 12 Israelis 'hurt my whole body' after she'd agreed to meet up with one of them, not knowing 11 others would be there

Relations between Tehran and Washington have soured significantly since the US withdrew unilaterally from the Iranian nuclear deal in 2018. US National Security Adviser John Bolton stated earlier this month that Iran will remain under pressure until Tehran abandons its nuclear weapons programme and 'violent activities' in the region.

Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has taken to Twitter, accusing US Security Adviser John Bolton of being behind an attempt to drag London into a quagmire after failing to lure President Trump into 'the war of a century'. The official added that prudence and foresight were the only options available when countering such ploys.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) has released a video showing the moment its operatives captured the UK-flagged tanker Stena Impero. The IRGC claims that a British frigate tried to interfere, but failed.

The impressive, movie-like footage was released by the elite Iranian force on Saturday, a day after it seized the tanker. The video shows the moment of the operation, when IRGC speedboats surrounded the vessel, which was apparently steaming ahead at full speed. The naval force was backed by a military helicopter, which deployed an assault team on the tanker’s deck.

The Farsi accounts of three Iranian news agencies have been suspended on Twitter since Friday, shortly after they reported the capture of a UK-flagged tanker in the Strait of Hormuz. Twitter says the events are unrelated.

SOURCE: ALJAZEERA.COM

Aspen, Colorado - The United States is concerned that a "miscalculation" by Iran could cause an "unintended conflict" in the Gulf, as it prepares to launch a new surveillance and intelligence initiative with its allies to ensure "free and open passage" for ships.

"We are starting a concept called Sentinel in which we will have a series of countries engaged to preserve the free and open passage of commerce in the Strait of Hormuz and in the Persian Gulf," US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy John Rood said at the Aspen Security Forum on Saturday.

The US has had discussions with NATO allies, some "partners in the Gulf" and others to join the effort to keep the "vital waterway" open, said Rood, adding that the new operation would "come into being over the coming days and weeks".

In recent weeks we have seen numerous probing attempts and provocations in and around the Strait of Hormuz — whether false flags or actual events — intended to raise the profile of the US’s unilateral withdrawal from the JCPOA, and renewed US sanctions versus Iran. Iran is pushing the issue with the United States, and is apparently offering a sacrificial pawn on the board (or perhaps knight!) by seizing two British oil tankers alleged to be operating illegally in the Strait of Hormuz.

While it is too soon to predict how the United States and its allies Israel and Saudi Arabia (both sworn enemies of Iran) will react, let’s explore the reasons why any US reactionary response will be largely symbolic, even if that involves a token strike versus Iran.

By mid-July 2019, four attack air groups set off from the US ports. Two air groups went into the Atlantic Ocean from a naval base on the east coast of the United States. Two – from the naval base on the west coast of the United States. At the same time, in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, respectively, they took to the sea in the same amphibious group with marines on board.

Historians have confirmed that Karl Marx was not only related to the Rothschilds, but was also employed as their agent in order to subvert democracy and corrupt the Socialist movement.

Karl Marx was born in a London squalor, and came from a long line of rabbis.

Henrymakow.com reports: He used to visit the Red Lion Pub at Great Windmill Street, Soho where he and Friedrich Engels were asked to write what became the Communist Manifesto. His best known work is the book Das Kapital, which fails to mention that money is printed out of thin air and by his cousins, the Rothschilds.

Grand Rapids First, a church in Wyoming, Michigan, announced on Sunday it will pay off the medical debt of 1,899 families.

The church paid nearly $2 million in medical bills for people suffering poverty. “Today, that $1,832,439.26 that’s looming over families right now, those families that are living at poverty rates or less, has been paid in full as a result of a gift from this church,” lead pastor Sam Rijfkogel told the congregation during his Sunday sermon. “Paid in full, not held against them one bit.”

Rijfkogel first learned of the medical debt forgiveness programs when a Texas church made headlines for paying off $10 million in medical debt within its community. Grand Rapids First Executive Pastor and CFO Doug Tuttle said that through this process, they learned of the massive weight of medical debt hanging over poor families in their state — nearly $180 million.

If the documents ended up in the hands of a malefactor, they would have gained a vast, if somewhat outdated, knowledge of the facility’s security system, including home addresses of the guards and computer passwords.

Top secret documents related to the notorious UK chemical weapons facility at Porton Down were found discarded in a trash bin in a north London car park, according to a Thursday report by The Daily Star.

After the edition was tipped by an undisclosed source about the documents, thousands of pages were retrieved from a public dumpster, reportedly containing highly-sensitive information regarding the chemical facility security, including details of equipment carried by the guards and their home addresses, details about the responsibilities of patrols and even passwords to computers, written in plain text, the Daily Mirror report says.

President Trump called out the four freshman congresswomen known as "The Squad," claiming that not only are they bad for America as a whole, they are damaging their own party.

The criticism comes amid a two-fronted political battle that Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley have been engaged in of late; one against Trump, and another against the Democratic establishment, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

"I don’t believe the four Congresswomen are capable of loving our Country," Trump tweeted Sunday morning. "They should apologize to America (and Israel) for the horrible (hateful) things they have said. They are destroying the Democrat Party, but are weak & insecure people who can never destroy our great Nation!"

President Trump might be his own man, but not when it comes to John Bolton and Israel. Trump is their man and is again being manipulated into starting a fisticuffs with Iran.

Someone in Washington, most likely Ziocon warmonger Bolton, got the UK to commit an act of piracy on the high seas and seize an Iranian oil tanker, Grace 1, on the grounds that Iran intended to deliver the oil to Syria in violation of US sanctions.

Iran’s leader, Khamenei, denounced Washington’s British stooge for “maritime banditry” and said there would be consequences. Today there were. Iran detained two British tankers.

This is what Bolton and Netanyahu wanted. They used it to wind up Trump’s fulminations against Iran. The trouble that the idiot British started with Iran is no concern of ours, but Trump’s threats are nevertheless issuing at a rapid pace.

While we may imagine a dystopian future of thought police, killer robots and nuclear fallout, the reality is much more boring. Instead of being brutally brainwashed and enslaved by fascist, authoritarian regimes we have willingly enslaved ourselves, meekly allowing the top 1% to get exponentially richer while we drown in a sea of debts, tech, advertising, endless wars, environmental destruction, addictions, depression... the list goes on.

Brilliant, isn't it? But it's ok, there's always Facebook to scroll through (Bored Panda too, obvs), Netflix to watch, chemical-laden meals to consume, manufactured outrages over a mermaid's skin color to comment on... who's got time for thoughtful resistance? Even those that think they are resisting by electing bigoted billionaires, bankers and Eton toffs to represent them are simply playing into their hands, as their dishonest, scaremongering claptrap divides us ever further over political, racial and gender lines!

Deutsche Bank is the most important bank in all of Europe, it has 49 trillion dollars in exposure to derivatives, and most of the largest “too big to fail banks” in the United States have very deep financial connections to the bank. In other words, the global financial system simply cannot afford for Deutsche Bank to fail, and right now it is literally melting down right in front of our eyes. For years I have been warning that this day would come, and even though it has been hit by scandal after scandal, somehow Deutsche Bank was able to survive until now. But after what we have witnessed in recent days, many now believe that the end is near for Deutsche Bank. On July 7th, they really shook up investors all over the globe when they laid off 18,000 employees and announced that they would be completely exiting their global equities trading business…

Being in the right place at the wrong time. That describes the plight of any law-abiding American citizen who has been victimized by a criminal illegal alien. Liberals will protest that the crimes inflicted on these citizens could have been committed by anyone, but that misses the point that illegals aren’t just anybody. They don’t belong here in the first place, a point that Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi — the leaders of the Democratic party in Congress — openly conceded until recently, when they began cynically seeing the warm bodies inhabited by illegals as potential votes.

Another argument the Left clings to is that illegals account for only a small portion of the violent crimes committed in the U.S. But that myth has just been debunked.

SOURCE: ZEROHEDGE

Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel, has arrived at the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado to serve out a sentence of life plus 30 years handed down on Wednesday. He was also ordered to pay $12.6 billion in restitution.

For two days, the 62-year-old Guzmán's whereabouts remained unknown - even to his lawyers, after federal authorities removed him from the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in lower Manhattan - described by the drug kingpin as "total torture" due to a lack of 'fresh air, clean water and sunlight.'

Late Friday afternoon, however, the Bureau of Prisons confirmed that he had been transferred to the Colorado prison (ADX), where he will live in a 7' x 12' concrete cell with a television (for good behavior) and a 4-inch window to the world for 23 hours per day, according to the New York Times.

SOURCE: ZEROHEDGE

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Could it be possible that we are on the verge of the next “Lehman Brothers moment”?

It takes a lot to rattle Wall Street.

But Deutsche Bank managed to. The beleaguered German giant announced on July 7 that it is laying off 18,000 employees—roughly one-fifth of its global workforce—and pursuing a vast restructuring plan that most notably includes shutting down its global equities trading business.

Though Deutsche’s Bloody Sunday seemed to come out of the blue, it’s actually the culmination of a years-long—some would say decades-long—descent into unprofitability and scandal for the bank, which in the early 1990s set out to make itself into a universal banking powerhouse to rival the behemoths of Wall Street.

These moves may delay Deutsche Bank’s inexorable march into oblivion, but not by much.