At a time of increased bullying of others by the United States, the five-nation Caspian Sea deal signed earlier this week shows the importance of diplomacy for mutual benefit and security.

While the Trump administration is winding up international tensions across the globe with its penchant for slapping sanctions and tariffs on other nations, the breakthrough development over the Caspian Sea points to how multilateral accord can be achieved, and peace between countries maintained.

For over 20 years, the seashore nations of Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Russia have been locked in dispute over territorial rights governing the Caspian – the world’s largest inland body of water.

But last Sunday, the leaders of the five countries signed a landmark legal convention which formulates a compromise on sharing the benefits – and responsibilities – of the sea’s rich resources.

The motorway bridge which collapsed in Genoa, Italy, killing at least 35 people had been the subject of a series of 'exorbitant' maintenance works and had been causing issues for decades, it has emerged.

Engineering experts had warned that it would have been more cost effective to knock the bridge down than to continue to repair the 'uneven' construction.

The Morandi Bridge, built in 1967, was a main thoroughfare connecting the A10 and A7 highways and had therefore been heavily trafficked for more than 50 years.

Tuesday morning was no different, and dozens of cars fell several hundred feet when a 260ft section of the concrete bridge collapsed shortly after 11.30am.

Let’s start with an exclusive report in the Huffington Post. Yashar Ali reports: “Manigault Newman told multiple Trump aides last December that the audio played for her by McClain included Trump allegedly used a racial slur in referring to a black ‘Apprentice’ contestant, Kwame Jackson.” This, Omarosa maintains is what “led her to resign” on the evening of December 12, 2017. Yet, Omarosa didn’t resign. She was fired by John Kelly.

During a closed-door and off-the-record meeting last week, top Facebook executive Campbell Brown reportedly warned news publishers that refusal to cooperate with the tech behemoth's efforts to "revitalize journalism" will leave media outlets dying "like in a hospice."

The defense in Paul Manafort's Alexandria, VA trial on bank and tax fraud charges have rested their case - without calling a single witness to the stand, including Manafort.

Having seemingly distracted the world, briefly, from being caught 'shadowbanning' conservatives (or should we say "using quality filters"), by outright-banning other right-leaning individuals (Alex Jones and Peter van Buren forever; and Candace Owen and Ron Paul Institute's Daniel McAdams temporarily), it appears Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey has a cunning plan for purging the rest of the world's naysayers from his platform.

"This week, we are suspending accounts for attempting to evade an account suspension. These accounts were previously suspended for abusive behavior or evading a previous suspension, and are not allowed to continue using Twitter."

Following two hours of meetings between top North and South Korean officials on Monday, the two sides announced that an agreement has been reached to hold a third summit in September. The summit will be in Pyongyang, though the exact date has not been announced.

Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in first met in April in the demilitarized zone, and then held a more informal summit in late May. At the time, officials on both sides suggested more summits were likely in the future.

As with the late May summit, this one comes amid signs that US-North Korea diplomacy is stumbling. South Korea has been advising the US on how to make progress, though often the US has rejected proposals that involve making any concessions.

North Korea is known to want a peace deal ending the 1950 Korean War, and the US is seen as resistant to the idea. The South Korean government has been pretty open about wanting peace too, however, and may try to get the process moving irrespective of US reticence.

The United States rejected a Russian offer to include mutual assurances of non-interference in polls from a proposed joint declaration at the Helsinki summit, media said.

Russia suggested adding a clause that would call cyberattacks on critical infrastructure – power grids, water pumps, banks and hospitals – unacceptable, three Russian and US officials told the Kommersant newspaper.

Sources said Moscow had proposed "joint measures to prevent the use of cyberspace to destabilize internal political processes, including elections." The United States initially agreed to sign the joint declaration but then rowed back on it.

Unbelievable. Just unbelievable. The five extremists of the New Mexico jihadist compound, where a 3-year-old was murdered, are being released from custody pending trial without any bail whatsoever. They are free on a a mere signature bond; a promise to return for trial.

Far left group’s open incitement to violence gets zero press coverage.

The mainstream media completely failed to report on Antifa members in DC yesterday, some of whom went on to assault police officers, carrying a banner which openly advertised their intention to put bullets in their political enemies.

Numerous video clips and photos show Antifa members carrying a large black banner which reads, “It takes a bullet to bash a fash.”

In another clip, leftists are asked what they would do if they met President Trump.

“I would murder him,” answered one, while another said, “We’d have to do him like Gaddafi.”

I asked leftist progressives outside the White House today what they would do if they met President Trump.
Their answers:
•"I would murder him."
•"We'd have to do him like Gaddafi."
•"If I get a chance to fuck him up I would."
•"Beat his ass."
There is violence on both sides pic.twitter.com/4HoofkZN3F

— Benny (@bennyjohnson) August 13, 2018

NBC Journalist Gadi Schwartz filed a remarkable ground report about the New Mexico terror camp. While reporting on the compound in Northern New Mexico, where children were believed to have been trained on how to carry out school shootings, Mr. Schwartz was given rare access and permission to tour the area by the rightful owner of the property.

We often find ourselves critical of MSM; however, this is one of those examples of a journalist filing a great report.

Brazilian authorities said on Monday August 13th that they seized 1.32 metric tonnes (2,910 pounds) of cocaine aboard an Italian-flagged ship in Brazil's main port of Santos, near Sao Paulo.

"The drugs were divided into 1,202 tablets distributed in 41 sacks" in two containers on the Grande Francia ship, which had arrived from Argentina, the customs department said.

According to G1 news site, the ship was attacked by pirates on Sunday. However it was unclear whether the incident was connected to the drugs discovery.

Amazon has been banned from claiming that its £79 a year 'Prime' service offers next day delivery on all items.

The US retail goliath, whose success has been instrumental in decimating the nation's high streets, has been found guilty of misleading customers.

The Amazon Prime service was set up on the basis that customers would pay a single annual fee or subscription - £79 - to get one day delivery on millions of purchases.

About a month ago we covered the basics of the lawsuit by which the US government was seeking to keep pretty much all of Kim Dotcom’s assets, despite the fact that Dotcom himself hasn’t been tried — and, in fact, it hasn’t even been determined if he can be extradited to the United States (a country he’s never visited). This week, that case took another step, with the judge, Liam O’Grady, who had already ruled that Kim Dotcom could be considered a “fugitive,” more or less finalizing the theft of Dotcom’s assets by declaring a default judgment in favor of the US. This isn’t the end of the process (not by a longshot), but it highlights just how the US government can use some ridiculous procedures to steal millions in assets from someone who hasn’t been shown to be guilty of anything.

There are certainly more than just the anti-Trump text messages sent by former FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok that led the second in command at the FBI to fire him. FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich actually overruled a recommendation by the bureau’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) to suspend and demote the former senior agent, and instead, terminated Strzok on Friday.

Former FBI special agents, some of whom worked with OPR for years, said they agree with Bodwich’s decision. They told SaraACarter.com that the system is broken and Bodwich had no other choice but to step in and fire Strzok. They say political leanings, friendships and dual systems of justice inside OPR have plagued how cases regarding FBI agents are adjudicated and handled.

The June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between high-ranking members of the Republican presidential campaign staff and a Russian lawyer with Kremlin ties remains the cornerstone of claims that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election.

A growing body of evidence, however, indicates that the meeting may have been a setup -- part of a broad effort to tarnish the Trump campaign involving Hillary Clinton operatives employed by Kremlin-linked figures and Department of Justice officials. This view, that the real collusion may have taken place among those who arranged the meeting rather than the Trump officials who agreed to attend it, is supported by two disparate lines of evidence pulled together for the first time here: newly released records and a pattern of efforts to connect the Trump campaign to Russia.

Judge Sarah Backus ordered the release of five suspects accused of running a “school shooting training camp” after one of their attorneys said they’re only being targeted because they’re “black and Muslim,” as opposed to “white and Christian.”

“Many people here live in unconventional ways,” Judge Baukus said.

“The NRA right now are telling us that guns are a good thing and that we should be training our teenagers to go ahead and use them, but now that we have someone who’s actually do that, and they’re not white, and they’re not Christian we think there’s some nefarious plan,” one of the suspects other attorneys told the media outside the court.

From CNN:

The evidence was intended to paint a disturbing picture of a zealous family training for a violent mission against government institutions, New Mexico prosecutors said.

Anyone who tells you the recent escalation of censorship by U.S. tech giants is merely a reflection of private companies making independent decisions is either lying or dangerously ignorant.

In the case of Facebook, the road from pseudo-platform to willing and enthusiastic tool of establishment power players is fairly straightforward. It really got going earlier this year when issues surrounding egregious privacy violations in the case of Cambridge Analytica (stuff that had been going on for years) could finally be linked to the Trump campaign. It was at this point that powerful and nefarious forces spotted an opportunity to leverage the company’s gigantic influence in distributing news and opinion for their own ends. Rather than hold executives to account and break up the company, the choice was made to commandeer and weaponize the platform. This is where we stand today.

A US appeals court has blocked the Federal Communications Commission's attempt to take a broadband subsidy away from Tribal areas.

The FCC decision, originally slated to take effect later this year, would have made it difficult or impossible for Tribal residents to obtain a $25-per-month Lifeline subsidy that reduces the cost of Internet or phone service for poor people. But on Friday, a court stayed the FCC decision pending appeal, saying that Tribal organizations and small wireless carriers are likely to win their case against the commission.

FCC stands by decision to raise broadband prices on American Indians

The security of the U.S. election system just lost a vote of confidence.

At the annual hacker conference DefCon, Emmett Brewer, an 11-year-old boy from Austin, Texas, was able to change the results on a mock Florida election website. It took him 10 minutes.

Though the website in question was a mere replica of the Florida Secretary of State website, the hack points to the larger vulnerabilities of the election infrastructure in the U.S. On the heels of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election, Microsoft has already detected evidence of Russian interference in three races in the 2018 mid-terms.

If only "states with the death penalty spent half as much time developing policy to support people in their lives as they did figuring out ways to kill people"

As Nebraska prepares to complete its first state-sanctioned execution in two decades, human rights groups are condemning the death penalty and denouncing officials for operating under a "cloak of secrecy" in obtaining the drugs that will be used to kill Carey Dean Moore—substances that have caused tens of thousands of accidental deaths across the U.S. in recent years.

Amnesty International denounced the state's move to participate in "the ultimate denial of human rights" after having carried out no executions since 1997.

A major component of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was the idea of line sharing, or local loop unbundling. Simply put, the rules set forth required that incumbent telcos needed to share their networks with smaller competitors, providing wholesale access to bandwidth. It was an effort to foster something vaguely resembling competition in the broadband space by letting smaller companies piggyback on existing network infrastructure. The thought was that because the barriers to market entry were so high (both politically and financially), this could help smaller competitors gain footholds that would otherwise be impossible.

The effort didn't work out for several reasons.