After 19 months of a "frustrating as hell' probe, the Senate Intelligence Committee has found "no factual evidence" of the Trump campaign colluding with Moscow, the chairman, Richard Burr, says.

Richard Burr (R-North Carolina), who heads the last bipartisan probe into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, shared in an interview with AP while there is "no factual evidence today that [it] received" on any collusion between President Donald Trump and Moscow after almost two years of the probe, the committee is not ready to end it. After all, he says he doesn't want to be the guy who missed something in the town where nothing "stays classified or secret forever."

Burr would not give a timeline for the end of the investigation, and the committee wants to do some challenging interviews. It has recently requested that persecuted WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange testify before committee staff "at a mutually agreeable time and location." Senators also want to talk to Christopher Steele, the author of the notorious dossier about Trump that turned out to be paid for by Democrats.

Taliban leader Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada has repeated his call for direct talks with the United States to end what he said was the foreign "occupation" of Afghanistan.

In a statement on August 18, Akhundzada said the militant group wanted "sincere, transparent, and result-oriented negotiations" with Washington.

He also said any peace settlement negotiated between the two sides must "preserve our Islamic goals, sovereignty of our homeland, and ensure an end to the war."

Akhundzada, believed to be living in hiding in neighboring Pakistan, has previously said the militants would not negotiate with the Afghan government, which he labelled a "corrupt regime" and a "puppet."

His statement came ahead of Eid al-Adha, an Islamic holiday that runs from August 21-25.

The government is expected to announce a temporary truce with the militants coinciding with the three-day holiday.

Akhundzada made no mention of the cease-fire in his statement.

We are coming down to the moment when anybody who's a hero in Washington will be an automatic supervillain in the world. America and her western allies have let criminals run amok for far too long. There are no better examples of this than the enshrinement of dastardly businessmen Bill Browder and Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Here's a story where "birds of a feather" really do flock together.

The New Yorker wants privateer investor Bill Browder to be seen wearing a red cape and blue tights. And New America Foundation fellow Joshua Yaffa, he wants to be his Lois Lane. Yaffa's latest anti-Putin rant entitled "How Bill Browder Became Russia's Most Wanted Man" attempts to portray Vladimir Putin as Lex Luther and Browder as Superman. Reading the piece again as I write this I feel the hatred from Yaffa; it's a kind of desperate avarice he must feel against Russia's leader. The way he rehashes the same old Sergei Magnitsky story that led to the passage of the 2012 Magnitsky Act by the Obama administration, it's pitiful really. Yaffa wants New Yorker readers to believe Browder's Hermitage Capital was in Russia at a critical moment to pass out $100 bills to poor people. But anybody who's worked for "The Man" knows, hedge fund owners are mostly a bunch of lying, godless crooks empowered by high priced lawyers. Yeah, I worked in the steel mills of America for a time.

When Austria's foreign minister gets married, you can expect politicians to be there - but maybe not a foreign head of state. However, one of Karin Kneissl's guests was Vladimir Putin, who arrived with a bouquet of flowers.

The bouquet wasn't the only gift up Putin's sleeve at the wedding of Kneissl and multi-millionaire Wolfgang Meilinger. He also brought along the Kuban Cossak Choir to entertain guests.

A Palestinian journalist has been arrested by Israeli authorities for filming soldiers operating in the West Bank city of Ramallah on Facebook Live. They claim he was inciting violence against Israel and the army.

Ali Dar Ali live-streamed two videos on Facebook on Tuesday morning, which showed Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers operating in the Al-Amari refugee camp. They were drawing up a plan of a Palestinian home, a procedure typically done before demolishing a building, according to Gaza-based journalist Hind Khoudary.

Israeli forces raided Ali's home and arrested him the following day. The journalist's mother, Umm Ali Dar Ali, told RT that the family was sleeping when they heard a knock on the door in the middle of the night.

Kristol went from leading conservative voice to being the leader of the anti-Trump "conservative" movement in a matter of a few years.

Kristol and The Weekly Standard published articles smearing The Gateway Pundit for supporting the Republican Presidential candidate.

Now we know that Kristol's fall was worse than we thought.

In mid-July 2018 a short video of an ad hoc execution in northern Cameroon of two young women and their children-one clasping the mother's hand, the other wrapped securely on the mother's back-circulated on social media sites. Armed soldiers in military fatigues escorted the two women and their children to their roadside death, taunting and striking them as they stumbled along. "Lift up your calabash so that we can see your face. You, B[oko] H[aram], you are going to die." As they blindfolded the women and made them kneel, one soldier said softly, "Little one, this hurts, but you know what your parents did." Stepping back, the soldiers took aim and fired 29 shots into the backs of their four victims. The bodies fell lifeless and silent. "This one is still living," stated one of the soldiers before shooting more rounds into the limp body of the little girl.

Following the video's circulation on Facebook and Twitter, Amnesty International issued a press release authenticating it. Cameroon's officialdom, with its singular focus on maintaining power since 1982, quickly refuted Amnesty's report, calling the video a "fake." But using a crowdsourcing approach and Google Earth mapping, a frame by frame analysis revealed the Mandara Mountains region of northern Cameroon to be the location of the crime and estimated that it likely took place around December 2014. The perpetrators are now reported to have been arrested although it is not known where they are held or what, if any, disciplinary sanctions they will face. A Commission of Enquiry-in Cameroon, the phrase a euphemism for an official cover-up-is apparently forming.

The video from northern Cameroon provides shocking visual evidence of Cameroonian security forces' abuse and torture of civilian populations in the Lake Chad basin region where Boko Haram operates. It forces viewers to bear witness to the everyday crimes committed with impunity by state forces in the name of fighting terrorism. Several days after authenticating the viral video, Amnesty International released a report revealing that the Rapid Intervention Battalion (BIR) of Cameroon, with the assistance of the US military, routinely commits war crimes, including torture, has converted a primary school in Fotokol into a military base, making schoolchildren a military target, and has established unofficial detention sites for those alleged-with little or no evidence-to follow Boko Haram.

Former UN Secretary General and famed diplomat Kofi Annan, 80, passed away in a Swiss hospital on Saturday, succumbing to a "short illness," according to his family.

The statesman passed away peacefully, surrounded by his wife and three children, Annan's family and foundation announced in a statement praising him for fighting for a "fairer and more peaceful world." His family asked for privacy in their time of mourning.

A renowned diplomat, Annan was born in 1938 in the British Crown Colony of Gold Coast, which later became the independent nation of Ghana. Starting his career in the World Health Organization, Annan then served as Ghana's director of tourism.

He went on to hold several high-ranking offices within the United Nations. In the early 1990s, as the Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping, Annan led a UN mission to war-torn Somalia and was the organization's special envoy to former Yugoslavia.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted on Monday that stops on her "listening tour" throughout the district, like the one held a day earlier in Corona, are "intended for lively, compassionate discourse with a diversity of viewpoints."

According to the Democratic nominee in the 14th Congressional District, she and the dozens of area residents who attended the event "talked about race, immigration, healthcare, disability rights and housing."

But unless you were in the room on Sunday, you won't know what specific community problems were mentioned or how Ocasio-Cortez planned to address them once she is sworn in.

That's because her campaign banned members of the media from attending the event, which was otherwise open to the public.

Russia and Germany are both set to benefit from the proposed gas pipeline to be discussed at Vladimir Putin and Angela Merkel's meeting on Saturday. But the pair will be wary of a backlash from an erratic and irate Washington.

The Kremlin and the Federal Government office have both confirmed that the €9.5 billion ($10.8 billion) project will be a key talking point - along with Syria and Ukraine - when the chancellor hosts the Russian leader at the Schloss Meseberg palace outside Berlin, during a surprise visit announced earlier this week. And while trench-lines are unlikely to shift on the status of Crimea or Bashar Assad's future, the Nord Stream 2 issue is a live one.

On paper, there shouldn't be much to talk about at all. The first part of the joint project between Gazprom and Western European energy giants has functioned without a hitch since 2011. The two new 1,200km-long underwater lines, doubling previous capacity, have been issued with permits by every country en-route from northern Russia to the German coast, apart from Denmark, whose parliamentary dithering over abstract "security concerns" is unlikely to delay completion beyond its scheduled date in 2020. In fact, dredging in preparation for laying the pipes already began back in May.