Iraq's Badr organization, which is part of the country's Popular Mobilization Forces or Hashd al-Sha'abi, says the US and Saudi Arabia are seeking to reactivate Daesh, adding that recent attacks by the Takfiri terrorist group serve that aim.

Speaking to Arabic-language al-Maalomah news agency, Mohammed Mahdi al-Bayati, a senior leader in the Badr Organization, revealed fresh attempts by Washington and Riyadh to facilitate the return of fugitive Daesh militants to Iraq.

The latest deadly terrorist attacks, which were conducted on Iraqi soil with the US and Saudi backing, were part of a plot to bring Daesh back, he added.

Bayati also noted that renewed US-Saudi support for Daesh is similar to that of 2014, when the Takfiri outfit unleashed a campaign of death and destruction in Iraq and overran vast swathes in lightning attacks.

There are no signs North Korean leader Kim Jong Un received heart surgery when he disappeared from state media for three weeks, but he reduced public activity due to coronavirus concerns, South Korean lawmakers briefed by the spy agency said on Wednesday.

Kim attended the completion of a fertiliser plant, North Korea's official media said on Saturday, the first report of his appearing in public since April 11.

His absence fuelled a flurry of speculation about his health and whereabouts, with a South Korean news outlet reporting Kim was recovering from a cardiovascular procedure while CNN said U.S. officials were monitoring intelligence he was "in grave danger" after surgery.


Members of South Korea's parliamentary intelligence committee said after a meeting with the National Intelligence Service (NIS) that the reports were "groundless."

"The NIS assesses that at least he did not get any heart-related procedure or surgery," committee member Kim Byung-kee told reporters. "He was normally performing his duties when he was out of the public eye."

"At least there's no heart-related health problem."

House Republicans pressed House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff to stop blocking the release of 53 witness interviews from the committee's investigation of Russian election interference.

Led by Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, 27 GOP lawmakers said in a Tuesday letter that the House Intelligence Committee voted unanimously in fall 2018 to release dozens of witness interview transcripts from its Trump-Russia investigation, but the transcripts have not been made public.

"We understand now that Chairman Schiff is blocking the release of these transcripts. This news, if accurate, is disturbing — especially in light of Chairman Schiff's cries in 2019 for transparency regarding allegations that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia," the congressmen said. "For almost four years, prominent Democrat politicians and commentators alleged that President Trump colluded with Russia, with Chairman Schiff going as far as to say that he had 'direct evidence' of collusion. Now that these allegations have been disproven by several investigations, the American people deserve to have transparency about why public figures such as Chairman Schiff continued to promote such wild accusations."

The letter is addressed to Schiff and Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the panel.

DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz's lengthy December report criticized the Justice Department and the FBI for 17 "significant errors and omissions" related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against Trump campaign associate Carter Page and for the bureau's reliance on British ex-spy Christopher Steele's unverified dossier. Steele put his research together at the behest of Glenn Simpson's opposition research firm Fusion GPS, funded by Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee through the Perkins Coie law firm.

The world has now been under Covid-19 lockdown for about two months, thanks to our fearmongering leaders, who've been comparing the coronavirus pandemic to a wartime situation and apparently competing with each other to see who can subject their populations to the most draconian measures. And they claim it's all necessary in order to save lives.

Never mind that as a consequence of the lock down it is likely that MORE people are dying than would otherwise have done, due to a variety of problems, not least the shuttering of primary health care - and particularly in 'Covid-19 hot spots', like the UK. So a strange "war" is going on where people are forced to sit at home and binge-watch Netflix while being frightened into submission by the media's wildly exaggerated claims about dubiously-acquired case/death numbers, and while the elderly and the vulnerable pay the highest price. It seems then that when justified by "saving lives", you can get away with literally anything - like killing off a bunch of people. We shouldn't be surprised though, because in just the last 20 years, several wars led by Western governments that killed, literally, more than 1.5 million people, were justified by the need to 'save people'

At the end of the World War 2, the US dropped two nuclear bombs on Japanese cities - in Hiroshima and Nagasaki - killing approximately 200,000 civilians. Officially, it too was done "in order to save lives". Whatever immoral crimes against humanity are committed, it's rationalized as necessary for some greater good - even if that means blowing hundreds of thousands of people to pieces with weapons of mass destruction.

If people could be made to believe that nuking Japan was done in order to 'save lives', if people could be made to believe that invading and occupying Iraq and killing 1.5 million Iraqis was to 'save them', then surely it's not a big task to convince them that subjecting a third of the global population to home imprisonment and risking the destruction of the global economy, will also 'save lives'.

There are always fairy tales for children and hard truths for adults. The fairy tale is offered to make people feel comfortable and safe. Truth, on the other hand, is what it is - not something that can be shaped and distorted to produce 'the right feeling'. Adults who remain as children, believing in fairy tales, are dangerous because they take or support actions that can have very serious consequences for themselves and for society as a whole.

In recent years, Israel has conducted hundreds of strikes against targets in Syria that presumably contain or belong to Syrian or Iranian forces. Iran denies the presence of troops in Syria and refers to its forces there as mere advisors to Bashar al-Assad's government.

Israel's military will continue its operations in Syria to pressure Iran, Israeli Defence Minister Naftali Bennett told state television on Tuesday.

"Iran has nothing to do in Syria... (and) we won't stop before they leave Syria," he said.

The defence chief went on to repeat the Israeli intelligence assumption that Iran was "trying to establish itself on the border with Israel to threaten Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa".

The MH17 wreckage was still burning when the Ukrainian secret service convinced western audiences that rebels had brought down the plane. However several persons that for years have been incriminated in the media are not suspected by the Dutch Public Prosecutor and are not standing trial.

Only six hours after the downing of MH17 the Ukrainian secret service SBU put a video on YouTube with tapped phone conversations from rebels in Ukraine, indicating that they had brought down MH17. The video was immediately picked up by the media, among which the Dutch evening news on July 17 2014. The SBU video got over a million views.

From then on the atmosphere was set. The rebels were to blame, and probably Russia too. No need to explore alternate scenarios incriminating for Ukraine. The media were mobilized to pick up any information that would confirm the rebels' and Russia's guilt, and to overlook contradicting intelligence.

The Trump administration is drafting a legal blueprint for mining on the moon under a new U.S.-sponsored international agreement called the Artemis Accords, people familiar with the proposed pact told Reuters.

The agreement would be the latest effort to cultivate allies around NASA's plan to put humans and space stations on the moon within the next decade, and comes as the civilian space agency plays a growing role in implementing American foreign policy. The draft pact has not been formally shared with U.S. allies yet.

The Trump administration and other spacefaring countries see the moon as a key strategic asset in outer space. The moon also has value for long-term scientific research that could enable future missions to Mars - activities that fall under a regime of international space law widely viewed as outdated.

Reps. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Mike Johnson, R-La., on Monday demanded that FBI Director Christopher Wray provide a slew of information after last week's bombshell revelations in the case of former national security adviser Michael Flynn -- and the lawmakers are specifically seeking to question a mysterious FBI agent, Joe Pientka, who participated in the January 2017 White House interview that led to Flynn's prosecution.

Fox News has previously determined that Pientka was also intimately involved in the probe of former Trump aide Carter Page, which the DOJ has since acknowledged was riddled with fundamental errors and premised on a discredited dossier that the bureau was told could be part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

Pientka was conspicuously removed from the FBI's website after Fox News contacted the FBI about his extensive role in Crossfire Hurricane Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) matters -- a change first noticed by Twitter user Techno Fog -- but sources say Pientka remains in a senior role at the agency's San Francisco field office.

Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden voted in favor of a motion that would have blocked the creation of the Senate office that receives sexual harassment complaints.

Biden was one of six Democrats who joined an effort to block the Office of Senate Fair Employment Practices in 1991 on the grounds that it was unconstitutional. The vote came less than two years before Tara Reade allegedly filed a complaint about her treatment as an employee in Biden's Senate office.

Created as a part of the Civil Rights Act of 1991 in the shadow of Anita Hill's testimony on Capitol Hill, the Office of Senate Fair Employment Practices was an attempt to remedy the fact that Congress was, at the time, exempt from workplace discrimination laws. An amendment to the civil rights law introduced by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) chartered the office and provided "procedures to protect the right of Senate and other government employees ... to be free from discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, or disability."

Grassley's amendment sparked fierce opposition from some of his colleagues, led by then-Republican senator Warren Rudman (N.H.), who argued that the office would become a "Son of Frankenstein" and warned that "everyone here will be in jeopardy and we will have done much violence to this body and the Constitution."

The Department of Homeland Security and FBI warned states earlier this year that Russia could look to interfere in the 2020 U.S. elections by covertly advising political candidates and campaigns, according to a law enforcement memo obtained by The Associated Press.

The Feb. 3 document details tactics U.S. officials believe Russia could use to interfere in this year's elections, including secretly advising candidates and campaigns. It says that though officials "have not previously observed Russia attempt this action against the United States," political strategists working for a business mogul close to President Vladimir Putin have been involved in political campaigning in numerous African countries.

The memo underscores how Trump administration officials are continuing to sound alarms about the prospect of future Russian interference in American politics even as President Donald Trump has sought to downplay the Kremlin's involvement in his 2016 win over Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Because it was prepared before the coronavirus outbreak, the memo does not reflect how the pandemic might affect the tactics Russia might use to interfere with the election.