Israeli forces raided the northern West Bank village of Kobar before dawn on Monday and destroyed the family home of Palestinian prisoner Qassam al-Barghouti, sparking widespread clashes in the village between armed Israeli soldiers and local youth.

Al-Barghouti is accused of being involved in an attack last August that killed Israeli teenager Rina Shnerb and injured her father and brother while they were hiking near the illegal Dolev settlement in the West Bank, northwest of Jerusalem.

According to local media reports, dozens of Israeli forces raided the village in the early hours of Monday and cordoned off the area around Barghouti's home before bulldozing the house to the ground. Forces also reportedly fired tear gas and other crowd dispersal measures on local youth who had gathered to attempt to stop the demolition by throwing stones and burning tires near the scene. Videos posted on social media show local youth hurling Molotov cocktails at the military convoy as they were leaving the village after completing the demolition.

The Palestinian Red Crescent reported that four Palestinians were injured during the clashes, including one person in moderate condition who was hit by a tear gas grenade.

The incident comes amid the ongoing standoff between US troops, Syrian Army units, local residents and Kurdish militia in northeast Syria, home to the majority of Damascus's oil and gas reserves.

Residents of two villages in the province of Hasakah, Syria set up roadblocks outside their communities, successfully preventing the passage of a US military convoy on Tuesday morning, SANA has reported.

The news agency obtained what is said to be video footage of the incident, showing villagers from the communities of Dashisha and Cahira standing in front of a group of US armoured vehicles, one of them fitted with an American flag, facing away from the group of civilians.

For many in the 21st century, losing social media access would be a devastating blow. However, for Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, it's just another day. For the third time in three years, Kadyrov has been banned from Instagram.

According to Instagram's owners, Facebook, the ban was in relation to US sanctions against the Chechen leader.

Since 2017, Kadyrov has been sanctioned by the United States under the terms of the Magnitsky Act. Signed by President Barack Obama in 2012, and later expanded in 2016, the Magnitsky Act enables the US government to sanction foreign government officials implicated in alleged human rights abuses.

"As an American company, we act within the framework of US sanctions legislation and are constantly taking measures to fulfill our legal obligations," a Facebook spokesman told news agency RIA.

The same fate also befell the account of Chechen parliament head Magomed Daudov, as well as regional Deputy Prime Minister Abuzayed Vismuradov and State Duma deputy Adam Delimkhanov.

Telegram has been forced to abandon its cryptocurrency initiative, with its founder Pavel Durov blasting the US for seeking to crush any attempt at decentralization in order to maintain its global financial dominance.

Telegram founder and St. Petersburg native Pavel Durov announced the move in a post to his own Telegram channel on Tuesday, stating the crypto project - the Telegram Open Network (TON) and its currency, known as "Grams" - would have to be shut down.

"Unfortunately, a US court stopped TON from happening," Durov said, adding that the court ruled "people should not be allowed to buy or sell Grams like they can buy or sell Bitcoins."

Perhaps even more paradoxically, the US court declared that Grams couldn't be distributed not only in the United States, but globally. Why? Because, it said, a US citizen might find some way of accessing the TON platform after it launched.

Mainstream media is running wild during the US coronavirus lockdown with the kind of distorted "facts" that would normally be ignored but have developed staying power due to pandemic-induced vulnerabilities in its audience.

More than two-thirds of Americans are determined to hide out in their homes until a Covid-19 vaccine comes along. Or so CNN appeared to claim in a Tuesday headline, declaring "68 percent of Americans say a vaccine is needed before returning to normal life." Citing a Gallup poll, the piece implied that until a vaccine is rolled out for the pandemic that has upended the lives of people around the world, most Americans are content to shelter in place, working from home (if they're lucky enough to be working at all) and absorbing reality through the mainstream media.

The actual Gallup poll the article cited said no such thing. "Availability of a vaccine to prevent Covid-19" was merely one item on a list of factors that respondents could rate as "very," "somewhat," or "not too important" as conditions for returning to their pre-pandemic routines. Indeed, a poll taken the previous week that specifically asked how many respondents would only return to normal if there was a vaccine found just 12 percent of respondents felt they needed the still-hypothetical jab to resume their lives.

The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has warned that Britain is facing a "significant recession" after the government's latest growth figures showed that the first few days of the country's lockdown caused a record drop in economic activity.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics showed that just nine days of harsh restrictions on businesses caused output to fall by 5.8% in March, and by 2% in the first three months of the year.

The ONS said the hit to the economy in late March had affected almost every sector of the economy and meant that output had dropped by almost as much in a single month as in the 18-month decline during and after the financial crisis of 2008-09. With people ordered to stay at home from late March, all three main components of growth - services, production and construction - were affected.

Over the past three years, Facebook has been removing accounts for participating in what they call "coordinated inauthentic behavior" (CIB). According to Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy, the Orwellian term refers to when "groups of pages or people work together to mislead others about who they are or what they're doing." Facebook takes down accounts for CIB due to "deceptive behavior" not for sharing false information. In the latest purge, Facebook removed accounts from two news outlets, SouthFront and News Front.

The two outlets have no affiliation; the only thing they share besides the word "Front" in their names is content that does not toe the Western mainstream media line. In its effort to remove CIB and limit "disinformation," Facebook partners with the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab (DFRLab). The Atlantic Council is a Washington-based think-tank that receives funding from Western and Gulf State governments, defense contractors, and social media outlets. Some of its top contributors for the 2018 fiscal year include the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Embassy of the UAE to the US, the US State Department, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon.

Last week, the United States Department of Education issued new regulations under Title IX concerning how schools must respond to allegations of sexual assault and sexual harassment. Predictably, the regulations have been slammed by groups such as the National Women's Law Center, which has said that they will "make it harder for students who have experienced sexual harassment to come forward and to get the help that many need." Given President Trump's record of disturbing comments about women, including boasting of sexually aggressive behavior, it's easy to believe that this is an accurate description of regulations set forth by his administration. However, these regulations in fact require a reasonable and balanced approach to a serious problem. They are not about protecting rapists from the consequences of their actions. Rather, they are about protecting innocent men falsely accused of sexual offenses from having their lives destroyed for something that they did not do. The regulations balance this with the important need to prevent sexual assault and punish those who are in fact guilty of this heinous crime.

To understand why these regulations are necessary, we need to turn the clock back nearly a decade to April 4th, 2011. On that date, the Department of Education sent a letter to the president of every college and university in the nation. Known as the "Dear Colleague" letter for its opening line, it outlined new requirements on how schools must respond to allegations of sexual assault on campus in order to be in compliance with Title IX, a federal law requiring schools to extend equal opportunities to all students regardless of their sex. There was an implied threat that schools would lose their federal funding if they did not comply. The issuance of this letter was of questionable legality. A federal law known as the Administrative Procedures Act requires that the public be given notice before any new regulations go into effect with ample time for citizens to submit comments indicating why they support or oppose the proposed regulations and suggesting modifications. The required notice-and-comment process was bypassed for the "Dear Colleague" letter, depriving the public of the opportunity to weigh in.

The Obama national security team's outrageous abuse of power mirrors the underbelly of our prosecutorial system at large.

The Department of Justice's case against retired Army Lieutenant General and former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn has exposed an ugly reality involving the abuse of power at the highest levels of the Executive Office all the way down the justice system this country ostensibly holds so dear.

Plea bargains are an unfortunate reality of an American system of justice which finds merit in coercing people to admit guilt for crimes they didn't commit in order to avoid the expense of a trial and to prevent friends and family from potential legal liability. If the purpose behind such procedural abuse of power is to fight actual crime, the American people have grown accustomed to turning a blind eye. But if the purpose is to exact political revenge on someone who has incurred the disfavor of those in power, then the plea bargain system is a direct assault on the Constitution that should insult every American, regardless where they stand on the respective merits of the case. General Flynn's case falls firmly in the latter category.

Scottsdale Community College's mishandling of a professor's academic freedom drew an apology from the district's interim chancellor Monday, just days after the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education sent a letter defending the professor's rights. The college tried to force professor Nicholas Damask to apologize for three quiz questions about Islamic terrorism that a student said were "in distaste of Islam." Damask added that the college suggested he would be required to meet with an Islamic religious leader to review the content of his course.

"I'm happy that the Maricopa Community College governing board has acknowledged the importance of the First Amendment and academic freedom, even into subjects that may be controversial — without that freedom of thought and inquiry, America just isn't America anymore," said Damask, who has been teaching at SCC for 23 years. "And I'm grateful for groups like FIRE that are willing to stand by me in the fight to defend that freedom."

FIRE sent an urgent letter to SCC on Thursday, outlining the college's free speech and academic freedom missteps and demanding that it abandon any suggestion that it will investigate or suppress his teaching.