Loud blasts echoed across Damascus late on Friday, residents said, as Syrian state media reported “enemy targets” coming from the direction of Israel, which has previously acknowledged conducting repeated strikes inside Syria.

The state television channel showed footage of the night sky with a point of light firing up into it and the sound of shooting, and reported that air defences had brought down some objects. It did not immediately report casualties or material damage.

There was no immediate comment from Israel, but it has been increasingly open in recent months about targeting sites in Syria that it says are connected to Damascus’ close allies Iran and Hezbollah.

The U.S. is putting pressure on its many partners across the world to follow its lead and ban Huawei from their national telecommunications networks, with the Trump Administration channeling the Bush one in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks by strongly implying that they are “either with us or against us.”

Unlike back then, however, few countries are going along with the U.S. pressure; probably because they understand the huge difference between joining an anti-terrorist military coalition and an anti-Chinese trading one.

Building off of that observation, Huawei’s services are inexpensive and high-quality, which is the exact opposite of what the competition is providing, whether American or otherwise, and it makes sense for countries to purchase its technology in order to help them modernize their telecommunications infrastructure in preparation for the global 5G revolution.

The United States will go to war with Iran if nothing is done to prevent it. This is the assumption that the world’s geopolitical actors have worked off for the better part of two decades, and there has been precious little evidence to the contrary.

In the early 2000s, once it became clear that the War on Terror was, for all intents and purposes, a war without end, Iran loomed in the background of the nightmares that engulfed Afghanistan and Iraq and persist to this day. The fact that this original member of the ‘Axis of Evil’ escaped the heyday of post-9/11 imperial adventurism has stuck in the craw of the United States’ sulking, unrepentant neoconservatives ever since.

Washington’s bid to “destroy Venezuela” is wrecking the international laws governing relations between all states, Venezuela’s ambassador to Britain Rocio Maneiro warned today.

“Nobody really understands the danger” of the precedent set by the decision by some countries to recognise would-be usurper Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s leader in contravention of all international norms, she warned.

At a press conference in central London, Ms Maneiro said her country was “under siege,” noting that a blockade designed to “break the nation” had already cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives and that “if the nation resists the US military stands ready to act.”

Ms Maneiro detailed the “net” cast by the US to trap Venezuela, including by oil sanctions that cost the country an estimated $6 billion (£4.7bn) in revenues in the first year from August 2017.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has sounded the alarm over a giant concrete dome built 40 years ago in the Marshall Islands to contain radioactive waste from Cold War-era atomic tests.

According to Guterres, the dome – which houses approximately 73,000 cubic meters of debris on Runit island, part of the Enewetak Atoll – may be leaking radioactive material into the Pacific Ocean, as the porous ground underneath the 18? thick dome was never lined as originally planned. It was constructed in the crater formed by the 18-kt Cactus test.

Iraq has spent the better share of the last 16 years under US military occupation. Despite this, time and again US-Iraqi relations have come to be defined by US hostility toward neighboring Iran, and Iraq’s desire to not get mixed up in that.

So while Iraq’s parliament was already bristling under Pentagon talk of staying in Iraq, and Trump saying that the US was staying in Iraq to “keep an eye on Iran,” the recent escalation of US rhetoric about a war against Iran has sparked action within parliament.

On Saturday, Iraq will be voting on a bill that would aim to expel all foreign troops from Iraqi soil, and singles out US troops in particular as needing to leave. The bill is endorsed by Iraq’s top two Shi’ite blocs, and is expected to pass fairly easily.

A U.S. Border Patrol agent warned that our nation has “lost control of the border,” during an interview on Fox News Channel.

During an interview with Fox News Channel’s Outnumbered, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Hector Garza, in his role as vice-president of the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC), told Harris Faulkner, “We’ve lost control of the border, as we are right now.” He continued saying we must come up with a new plan to correct the problems that led to the loss of control of the border.

Pundit and black conservative activist Candace Owens blasted big tech bias after Breitbart News’ exclusive story that she has been placed on a list of “hate agents” maintained by Facebook.

Yesterday, a source at Facebook exclusively spoke to Breitbart News about the “hate agents” list, which includes a number of prominent recently-banned individuals including Paul Joseph Watson, Laura Loomer, and Alex Jones.

A Facebook spokeswoman confirmed the existence of the list, but denied that Candace Owens has been investigated. The spokeswoman also emphasized that a recent seven-day ban of Owens was a mistake and has been reversed.

“More and more Americans are waking up to, and rejecting the fantastical ideology of the Left. What we’re seeing now are social media companies that are desperate to help subvert a mass awakening” Owens said in a comment to Breitbart News.

Speaking at China’s second Belt and Road conference in Beijing featuring 37 heads of state, Russia President Vladimir Putin unveiled the intention to unite Russia’s Northern Sea Route with China’s Maritime Silk Road. This announcement should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the close strategic friendship between both countries since the 2015 announcement of an alliance between the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union and Belt and Road Initiative. This extension of the Maritime Silk Road represents a powerful force to transform the last unexplored frontier on the Earth, converting the Arctic from a geopolitical zone of conflict towards a new paradigm of mutual cooperation and development.

There are many indications that the United States and China are creeping towards a potential conflict in the South China Sea. When the motivations behind this war become clear the stakes become that much more serious.

While the world is drumming up a potential maritime showdown between the US and Iran (yet again), Western media is conveniently ignoring a potential looming conflict in the South China Sea, one that has been building up for years.

Former Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., says there are unreleased transcripts of recorded conversations between FBI informants and former Trump campaign associate George Papadopoulos that “has the potential to be a game changer.”

In a Fox News interview with Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, the former House Oversight Committee chairman said when the FBI listens in on phone calls or sends in an informant wearing a wire then “there’s a transcript of that” and that “one in particular has the potential to actually persuade people.”

In laying out a series of questions about the origins of the counterintelligence investigation into President Trump's campaign and the FBI and Justice Department's handling of the operation, Gowdy listed a series of questions he thinks need to be answered, including: “Where are the transcripts, if any exist, between the informants and the telephone calls to George Papadopoulos?”

The United States banned all air transport with Venezuela on Wednesday over security concerns, further isolating the troubled South American nation…

A disinterested historian — Herodotus raised from the dead — would see this as just the latest volley in a siege tale. America has been trying for ages to topple the regime of President Nicholas Maduro, after trying for years to do the same to his predecessor, Hugo Chavez.

The new play in the Trump era involves recognizing Juan Guaidó as president and starving and sanctioning the country. Maduro, encircled, has been resisting.

The American commercial news landscape, in schism on domestic issues, is in lockstep here. Every article is seen from one angle: Venezuelans under the heel of a dictator who caused the crisis, with the only hope a “humanitarian” intervention by the United States.

The second day of an outbreak of severe weather Saturday brought 10 reported tornadoes to to the Plains, part of 38 reported tornadoes since Friday.

Which came first, the pigs or the pioneers? In Barbados, that has been a historical mystery ever since the first English colonists arrived on the island in 1627 to encounter what they thought was a herd of wild European pigs.

A recent discovery by an SFU archaeologist is shedding new light on the matter. Christina Giovas uncovered the jaw bone of a peccary, a South American mammal that resembles a wild pig, while researching a larger project on prehistoric animal introductions in the Caribbean.

"I didn't give it much notice at the time, but simply collected it along with other bones," says Giovas, the lead author of a study just published in PLOS ONE. "It was completely unexpected and I honestly thought I must have made a mistake with the species identification."

Soldiers oversaw rationing of gasoline at service stations in several parts of Venezuela on Sunday as worsening fuel shortages forced angry drivers to wait for hours to fill their tanks, prompting protests in some areas.

If Bernie Sanders were an MLB general manager, he would probably be the type who chases bargain players rather than signing free agents to mega contracts.

The presidential contender posted a video on his Twitter account Saturday showing him at a campaign stop talking about raising pay for school teachers. And he used baseball salaries to make his point.

Saudi Arabia does not want war but will not hesitate to defend itself against Iran, a top Saudi diplomat said Sunday after the kingdom’s energy sector was targeted this past week amid heightened tensions in the Persian Gulf.

U.S. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, warned Iran that it will face destruction if it seeks a fight, while Iranian officials said their country isn’t looking for war. Trump spoke after a rocket hit near the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi minister of state for foreign affairs, spoke a week after four oil tankers— two of them Saudi — were targeted in an alleged act of sabotage off the coast of the United Arab Emirates and days after Iran-allied Yemeni rebels claimed a drone attack on a Saudi oil pipeline.

A horrific story has sent shock and panic through Pakistan, further entering global headlines at the end of this week: Pakistani police are holding a doctor on suspicions that he intentionally infected over 500 people, including 400 children, with the HIV virus.

The investigation began after an HIV epidemic was uncovered in an urban district of Pakistan's south starting in February, and after over ten families accused a local doctor of treating their children with used syringes.

California's housing affordability crisis is getting worse. Affordability in San Francisco is now at 10-year lows, and only one in five households can afford to purchase a median-priced single-family home in the Bay Area. The crisis has driven many people onto the water, living on makeshift boats, outside marinas, and wealthy communities.

The floating homeless population in wealthy Marin County, just across the Golden Gate Strait from San Francisco, has doubled in the last five years to over 100. The community of 200 barges, sailboats, and other vessels comprise of people who are employed but can't afford to live on land, jobless folks, the homeless, and some people who are mentally ill. Boat life for them isn't easy:

"It's not a free ride. It's a lot of effort to be out here," said Kristina Weber, who moved onto a 54-foot vessel she purchased for $15,000 because she couldn't afford to rent in Sausalito.

With the entire US agriculture sector facing a 1980s style farm crisis downturn and record debt levels, demand for new tractors is set to collapse as farmers hang on to old Deere & Co. equipment, reported Bloomberg.

Heavy flooding in the last several months across the Midwest, a deepening trade war with China, depressed commodity prices, skyrocketing fuel costs, declining land values, and massive debt loads have squeezed farmers so much that Deere slashed production last week to deal with the downturn.

Former Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell in the George W. Bush administration, warns in a new The Real News interview with host Sharmini Peries that the United States government is driving down a “highway to war” with China — a war for which Wilkerson sees no sound justification.

The drive toward war is not undertaken in response to a real threat posed by China to the people of America. Instead, argues Wilkerson, the US government is moving toward war for reasons related to money for both the military and the broader military-industrial complex, as well to advance President Donald Trump’s domestic political goals.

On May 17 and May 18, the Syrian Air Defense Forces (SADF) intercepted several unidentified aerial objects over Damascus and the southern part of the country. In both cases, the intercepted targets came from the southern Syria border, near the contact line with Israel.

Some sources speculated that the SADF was repelling Israeli strikes. However, no explosions were reported in Damascus and its countryside as well as pro-government sources were not able to present any vestiges of intercepted missiles. The situation with the interceptions remains unclear.

At the same time, the Damascus government and Russia came with another peaceful initiative for Idlib militants. On May 18, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) introduced a temporary ceasefire halting offensive operations around Idlib, in particular in northwestern Hama.

Despite the organisers describing the Eurovision Song Contest as a non-political event, the issue of Palestine took back, front and centre stage in Tel Aviv over the weekend, which may make Israel come to regret its weaponisation of culture and the whitewashing of its discrimination against the Palestinian people.

Reaching a global audience that the pro-Palestine lobby could only dream of, Eurovision gave the Palestinian cause a platform and exposure to an audience of millions not normally confronted by Middle East politics. When you get the headline act Madonna including the Palestinian flag on the back of one of her dancers, as well as Icelandic band Hatari displaying Palestinian banners on live television, it’s hard to ignore the policies and practices of Israel, which these days are likened — with good reason — to the abhorrent apartheid system of racial segregation which once dominated life in South Africa.

On September 11, 2001 five employees of a moving van company called "Urban Moving Systems" were apprehended hours after the twin towers were struck. An eyewitness saw them celebrating the attacks on the World Trade Center from the window of her apartment building.They emerged from a white van, jumped up and down, and high-fived each other with apparent glee. The eyewitness observed them in New Jersey overlooking the Hudson River with an unobstructed view of the burning towers. The eyewitness contacted the police. What follows are FBI reports obtained under the Freedom of Information Act regarding their detention, questioning and apparent deception during polygraphs about affiliation with Israeli intelligence agencies.

France has threatened three French journalists with potential jail time for using secret documents to reveal the country's involvement in the Yemen civil war.

In a series of reports published in April, investigative journalists from Disclose and Radio France revealed the number of French arms sold to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

According to sources, a top Israeli Rabbi close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said the Iran War "rollout" by the Trump Administration was a "total disaster." The Rabbi reportedly named Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton as the "culprits" in their "ineptitude in getting America involved in the war."

New plans are now underway to "shift the narrative" and "rebuilt trust" in the American media by positioning them as "seemingly antiwar." A new false flag scenario is being put together so that "next time this happens Americans will get on board."

First of all, let me say that gold price suppression (“fixing,” “rigging,” “manipulating” or however else you want to think about it) is not just a conspiracy theory.

It’s a well-documented phenomenon, with real actors and real ramifications.

In 2014, Barclays was fined nearly $44 million for failing to prevent traders from manipulating the London gold “fix.” Late last year, a former JPMorgan trader pleaded guilty to manipulating the U.S. metals markets. Remember the gold futures “flash crash” of 2014?

The GMT will integrate seven primary mirrors to form a light-collecting surface 80 feet (24.5 m) wide, giving the scope a resolving power 10 times greater than that of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. (The scope will also employ seven smaller secondary mirrors, which will bounce light from the primaries down to a camera system.)

From the apartheid wall to military checkpoints to the blockade of Gaza, Palestinians living under occupation and apartheid face many barriers to doing the every day things many of us take for granted: going to school, getting to work, traveling to see friends and family.

But there are also digital barriers Palestinians have to deal with. PayPal, a U.S. company that operates a worldwide online payments system, doesn’t allow Palestinians in the Occupied Territories to use their services. Meanwhile Jewish settlers in the West Bank living on stolen Palestinian land can use PayPal as they please.

A coalition of Palestinian businesses and civil society groups is calling on PayPal to end this discrimination against Palestinians.

The Eiffel Tower closed down on Monday after a man began trying to scale the Paris monument.

A person could be seen dangling just below the third and highest level of the structure. A rescuer dressed in red was just above him.

Police said the climber was a male.

"Once burned, twice shy." That's good advice if you're working around a hot stove. It's an equally wise strategy for anyone responsible for administering Windows 10 PCs.

After the disastrous rollout of Windows 10 version 1809, you should indeed be extremely wary of touching that hot stove. Microsoft had grown cocky after a handful of relatively trouble-free feature updates to Windows 10, and had even bragged about how quickly it was able to roll out those semi-annual feature updates. That hubris caught up with them in late 2018.

Ford is cutting 7,000 white-collar jobs, or about 10% of its salaried staff worldwide, as part of a cost-cutting effort it says will save the company about $600 million a year.

Ford says workers will begin to be notified of cuts starting Tuesday, and the terminations will be completed by the end of August. About 2,400 of the jobs cuts are in North America, and 1,500 of the positions were eliminated through a voluntary buyout offer.

South Korea vowed Monday to move quickly on plans to provide $8 million worth of medical and nutritional aid for North Korean children through U.N. agencies while it also considers sending broader food aid to the country, which says it is suffering its worst drought in decades.

Lee Sang-min, spokesman for Seoul's Unification Ministry, said the government will discuss its plans with the World Food Program and the United Nations Children's Fund, through which the aid would be provided, so it reaches North Korean children and pregnant women quickly. South Korea is also trying to build public and political support for providing wider food aid to North Korea, either directly or through the WFP.

North Korea's state media said last week that the country was suffering its worst drought in more than a century amid reported food shortages.

Snow is falling fast and furiously on I-40 near Bellemont. It's cold and slippery across the Flagstaff region. If you go for a drive, bring warm clothes, blankets, snacks and water, fill up your gas tank and leave plenty of space ahead of you.

President Trump has denied reports that thousands of migrants are to be flown from the Mexican border to Florida in a bid to ease pressure on overcrowded checkpoints.

His denials come after Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan admitted there were initial plans to ship migrants to Palm Beach and Broward - but that these were not considered viable or 'an effective use of government resources.'

Trump however insisted the plans were never considered, calling it 'false reporting' - and tweeting: 'There are no plans to send migrants to northern or Coastal Border facilities, including Florida... Our country is FULL, will not, and cannot, take you in!'

Yesterday, hundreds of undocumented migrants took control of Terminal 2 of the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris France. Approximately 500 migrants seized the terminal.

“France does not belong to the French! Everyone has a right to be here!” one person can be heard yelling into a loudspeaker.

The Trump administration’s war hawks couldn’t have asked for a more docile casus belli than the Katyusha rocket that landed a mile outside the US embassy in Baghdad’s American-occupied Green Zone on Sunday night, sparing persons, property, and the pride of a president who must have begun to doubt whether the mounting tensions between the US and Iran had any basis in reality at all – or whether the deliberately vague “credible intelligence” on the Iranian “threat” supplied by the Mossad was not a trick to convince the US to take out Israel’s last regional rival.

Ukraine's new President Volodymyr Zelensky used his inaugural speech on Monday to announce a snap election, before promising to end the country's five-year conflict with Russia.

A month after scoring a landslide victory against incumbent Petro Poroshenko amid widespread public discontent with the political establishment, the 41-year-old comedian has become Ukraine's youngest post-Soviet president.

Zelensky said he would dissolve the country's legislature in order to call early parliamentary elections, which had originally been scheduled for October.

Italian unions have refused to load cargo onto a Saudi ship carrying weapons, in protest against Riyadh’s war on Yemen. The dock workers have gone on strike, refusing to work until the ship leaves port in Genoa.

While the Saudi Arabian ship, the Bahri-Yanbu, was expected to leave for Jeddah by the end end of the day, it seems the delivery might end up being rather late. After unsuccessful attempts to have the ship barred from docking in Italy altogether, it was greeted by banners and a protests as it arrived in port Monday.

Gov. Ron DeSantis indicated Thursday that he plans to sign a bill to combat anti-Semitism while on a trip to Israel this month.

DeSantis referred to the issue during an appearance in Miami Gardens, saying “we have an anti-Semitism bill, which is one of the strongest in the nation, that I’ll sign into law, actually I think I will sign it into law when we’re in Jerusalem doing a Cabinet meeting.”

A report out of the New York Times which alleges President Donald Trump and his top adviser Jared Kushner were laundering money to Russian individuals has been shot down by a Kushner Companies spokeswoman who says the failing publication “continues to create dots that just don’t connect.”

Kirsten Gillibrand, lagging well behind in every major Democratic presidential poll, decided to charge up her base by offering a wild immigration proposal which would render border laws effectively meaningless.

Appearing on ‘Face the Nation,’ Gillibrand announced that she would not detain illegal aliens at all and simply place them into the community.

“I wouldn’t use the detention system at all,” Gillibrand bragged. “They don’t need to be incarcerated.”

In April President Donald Trump tweeted out a stunning report by former CIA analyst Larry Johnson on OANN. Johnson accused the United Kingdom of helping the Obama administration spy on the 2016 Trump presidential campaign.

The likelihood of a U.S. war with Iran is increasing, despite alternately isolationist and provocative messages coming from Trump administration officials.

The U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln is now sitting off the coast of Iran, and the U.S. has asked its non-emergency personnel to leave nearby Iraq. Meanwhile, there is a debate about images of what the New York Times described as “missiles on small boats in the Persian Gulf that were put on board by Iranian paramilitary forces.” Whether those missiles photographed were offensive or defensive is important in determining whether the U.S. is misrepresenting Iran’s actions as threatening.

Imagine this: You’ve lived in your hometown for decades, surrounded by your family and friends. But one day, gun-toting militias show up. You flee in terror. Then another family moves into your house–and you are banned from returning. This is the 1948 Nakba, the catastrophe, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

A New Hampshire cafeteria worker who was fired after giving a hungry student a free lunch has been offered a job with a world renowned chef.

Chef José Andrés, who is known for providing free meals to survivors of natural disasters, tweeted the story of Bonnie Kimball Friday and encouraged her to apply for a position at the celebrity chef's company, according to a report on News Center Maine.

"New Hampshire school cafeteria worker fired for giving food to student who couldn’t pay … The hero is Bonnie Kimball! If she needs a job we have openings at @thinkfoodgroup if you know her, let her know!" Andrés said in his tweet.

For nearly two decades, one of the most overlooked and little known arrests made in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks was that of the so-called “High Fivers,” or the “Dancing Israelis.” However, new information released by the FBI on May 7 has brought fresh scrutiny to the possibility that the “Dancing Israelis,” at least two of whom were known Mossad operatives, had prior knowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Rapid DNA testing has revealed that almost 1/3 of illegal migrants apprehended at the southern US border were not biologically related to the children they were traveling with, nor were they cases of step-fathers or adoptive parents, according to the Washington Examiner.

The findings were a result of a pilot program conducted by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in El Paso and McAllen, Texas.

A commonly used pesticide known as atrazine can turn male frogs into females that are successfully able to reproduce, a new study finds.

While previous work has shown atrazine can cause sexual abnormalities in frogs, such as hermaphroditism (having both male and female sex organs), this study is the first to find that atrazine’s effects are long-lasting and can influence reproduction in amphibians.

The results suggest that atrazine, which is a weed killer used primarily on corn crops, could have potentially harmful effects on populations of amphibians, animals that are already experiencing a global decline , said study author Tyrone B. Hayes of the University of California, Berkeley. Atrazine is banned in Europe.

And since atrazine interferes with the production of the sex hormone estrogen, present in people and frogs, the findings could have implications for humans as well. "If you have problems in amphibians, you can anticipate problems in other animals," Hayes said.