China told the US not to take sides or infringe upon the "sovereignty and security" of Beijing on the eve of The Hague court's ruling on the disputed islands in the South China Sea.

A phone conversation on maritime issues took place between Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and US Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday, Chines Xinhua agency reported.

The conversation comes less than a week ahead of the ruling by the International Court of Arbitration in The Hague on the South China Sea dispute between China and the Philippines. The ruling is due to be announced on July 12.

The arbitration is tainted "with illogical and flawed application of procedures, laws and evidence," Wang said.

Wang once again repeated that China won't accept the upcoming ruling, adding that "the arbitration tribunal farce should come to an end."

I guess a Nuremburg trial might have been a better place to sort out the minutiae of the Blair-Bush crimes we committed to go to war in the Middle East. We brought about the deaths of up to half a million people, most of them Muslims who were as innocent as Blair was guilty. A Nuremburg-style court might thus have concentrated more on the mass Arab victims of our criminal expedition than the heinous guilt and "profound regret" - his words, of course - of Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara.

Sure, Blair lied about the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction before going to war, then lied about the Foreign Office warnings of the chaos that would overwhelm Iraq and now - today - pretends that the Chilcot report has proclaimed him innocent when in fact it says he is quite the opposite.

But a prolonged study of the report, rather than the necessarily swift precis we have been fed these past few hours, may produce lines of enquiry far more distressing than the conclusions in the easy-to-regurgitate, simplified and shorter version handed out to the media. Besides, our concentration on the iniquitous Blair and his lies, while itself an understandable response to Chilcot, has provided a worrying diversion from the mendacity that still today afflicts our political class, our prime ministers and party leaders, and their insulting attitude towards those they claim to represent.

FBI Director James Comey has been grilled by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee over the bureau's probe into the use of a private email server by Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state and his recommendation not to charge her.

On Tuesday, Comey recommended not charging Clinton with any wrongdoing, despite evidence of "extremely careless" conduct.

"The FBI's recommendation is surprising and confusing," Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said, announcing the hearing. ."The fact pattern presented by Director Comey makes clear Secretary Clinton violated the law. Individuals who intentionally skirt the law must be held accountable. Congress and the American people have a right to understand the depth and breadth of the FBI's investigation."

"You have set a precedent, and it's a dangerous one," Chaffetz said.



Ranking Member Elijah Cummings (D-Maryland), accused the House Republicans of political posturing and wasting taxpayer money on investigating charges that were "debunked," such as Benghazi and the email scandal. Cummings had publicly endorsed Clinton in April.

Russian journalist Matvey Ganapolskiy, known for his critical statements against the Russian government, received funds from the US government agency BBG. This is evidenced by open data from the public procurement website of the United States.

The money for Ganapolskiy, according to the database of procurement of contracts and grants of the American government, was transferred in 2010. The last recorded payment to the journalist is dated 2014. There had been 19 transfers in total amounting to $12,800.

A nation is its institutions. If those institutions are overrun and no longer exist, so too does the nation itself cease to exist. Institutions range from the offices of government, to education, to agricultural and economic development, to the management of natural resources, national infrastructure including energy and transportation, and security. These are the things we think about when we think about the concept of a modern nation-state.

Contrary to popular belief, the invasion and occupation of any particular nation is not a mere exercise of military might. It also, by necessity, involves the destruction or overrunning and eventual replacement of all the above mentioned institutions.

The most extreme modern-day example of this was the US invasion of Iraq, where Iraqi institutions from top to bottom were either entirely destroyed and replaced, or taken over by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). The CPA was literally headed by an American, Paul Bremer, who, far from being a military man, was instead drawn from the US State Department and a background of chairing corporate-financier boards of directors.

The CPA assumed responsibility for all aspects of life in Iraq, from the privatization of Iraq's economy, to "reconstruction," to reorganizing the nation socially, politically, and economically.

The average onlooker will remember US President George Bush's "shock and awe," and may remember several of the more notorious battles of the invasion and subsequent occupation. What they rarely recall is the all encompassing dominion the US assumed over the nation through the CPA which was merely underpinned by US military forces. Yet despite the relatively dull nature of the CPA's work versus security operations carried out by American forces, the CPA is what essentially "occupied" and ultimately conquered Iraq.

Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov is seeking to take advantage of the thaw in Russian-Turkish relations occasioned by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's formal expression of regret late last month for the death of a Russian pilot in connection with the shooting down in November by Turkish fighter aircraft of a Russian bomber that Ankara claimed had entered Turkish airspace from Syria.

In an Instagram post on July 5, Kadyrov demanded that Erdogan order the handover to the Russian authorities of 12 Chechens he identifies as "terrorists," some of whom allegedly played key roles in the wars of 1994-96 and 1999-2000 and the subsequent low-level insurgency. Kadyrov further lent credence to suspicions that another former Chechen militant, Akhmad Chatayev, masterminded the June 28 suicide bombings at Istanbul airport in which 45 people died and hundreds more were injured.

The men whose handover Kadyrov is demanding include Movladi Udugov, the ideologue and press spokesman first of the Chechen Republic Ichkeria (ChRI) and then of the Caucasus Emirate proclaimed in 2007 by then-ChRI President Doku Umarov; Umarov's brother Akhmad; and Shirvani Basayev, the brother of renegade field commander Shamil Basayev, who was killed in 2006. All three have lived openly in Turkey for many years.

FBI Director Comey's announcement that he doesn't think Hillary Clinton should be prosecuted for sharing government documents on her private, unsecured email server is very troubling ...

The FBI Re-Wrote 6 Criminal Laws to Let Clinton Off the Hook

Former FBI director Chris Swecker said Comey should have brought charges against Clinton:

He seemed to be building a case for that and he laid out what I thought were the elements under the gross negligence aspect of it, so I was very surprised at the end when he said that there was a recommendation of no prosecution and also given the fact-based nature of this and the statement that no reasonable prosecutor would entertain prosecution, I don't think that's the standard.

Andrew McCarthy - former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, who led the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others, obtaining convictions for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing - notes:

In essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require. The added intent element, moreover, makes no sense: The point of having a statute that criminalizes gross negligence is to underscore that government officials have a special obligation to safeguard national defense secrets; when they fail to carry out that obligation due to gross negligence, they are guilty of serious wrongdoing. The lack of intent to harm our country is irrelevant. People never intend the bad things that happen due to gross negligence. I would point out, moreover, that there are other statutes that criminalize unlawfully removing and transmitting highly classified information with intent to harm the United States. Being not guilty (and, indeed, not even accused) of Offense B does not absolve a person of guilt on Offense A, which she has committed. It is a common tactic of defense lawyers in criminal trials to set up a straw-man for the jury: a crime the defendant has not committed. The idea is that by knocking down a crime the prosecution does not allege and cannot prove, the defense may confuse the jury into believing the defendant is not guilty of the crime charged. Judges generally do not allow such sleight-of-hand because innocence on an uncharged crime is irrelevant to the consideration of the crimes that actually have been charged. It seems to me that this is what the FBI has done today. It has told the public that because Mrs. Clinton did not have intent to harm the United States we should not prosecute her on a felony that does not require proof of intent to harm the United States.

Meanwhile, although there may have been profound harm to national security caused by her grossly negligent mishandling of classified information, we've decided she shouldn't be prosecuted for grossly negligent mishandling of classified information. I think highly of Jim Comey personally and professionally, but this makes no sense to me. Finally, I was especially unpersuaded by Director Comey's claim that no reasonable prosecutor would bring a case based on the evidence uncovered by the FBI. To my mind, a reasonable prosecutor would ask: Why did Congress criminalize the mishandling of classified information through gross negligence? The answer, obviously, is to prevent harm to national security. So then the reasonable prosecutor asks: Was the statute clearly violated, and if yes, is it likely that Mrs. Clinton's conduct caused harm to national security? If those two questions are answered in the affirmative, I believe many, if not most, reasonable prosecutors would feel obliged to bring the case.

Fifteen "secret warrants" are in force to enable British intelligence services to collect bulk data about online and phone traffic, the Interception of Communications Commissioner's Office (IOCCO) has revealed. The number of orders imposed on telephone and internet companies under Section 94 of the Telecommunications Act has been published for the first time by the surveillance watchdog. A further eight warrants are in place to provide for emergency services, civil contingencies and to protect security personnel. The directions were acquired by the government's electronic monitoring agency GCHQ and the national security service MI5.

The watchdog says all Section 94 directions are subject to secrecy restrictions, which severely limits what it is able to say about the directions and the actions taken as a result of them. They are related to traffic data and do not include the content of calls or emails.

Parliament does not have to be notified of Section 94 directions. Until last year they were not subject to formal oversight from any watchdog. Their operation will be recognized under the Investigatory Powers Bill, also known as the 'snoopers' charter,' which is currently under review in the House of Lords.

What bothers me is not that we are unable to find the solution to our problems, what bothers me more is the fact that neoliberals are so utterly unaware of the real structural issues that their attempts to sort out the tangential issues will further exacerbate the main issues. Religious extremism, militancy and terrorism are not the cause but the effect of poverty, backwardness and disenfranchisement.

Empirically speaking, if we take all the other aggravating factors out: like poverty, backwardness, illiteracy, social injustice, disenfranchisement, conflict, instability, deliberate training and arming of certain militant groups by the regional and global players, and more importantly grievances against the duplicitous Western foreign policy, I don't think that Islamic State, al-Qaeda and the likes would get the abundant supply of foot soldiers that they are getting now in the troubled regions of Middle East, North Africa and South Asia.

Moreover, I do concede that the rallying cry of "Jihad in the way of God" might have been one reason for the abundant supply of foot soldiers to the jihadists' cause, but on an emotional level it is the self-serving and hypocritical Western interventionist policy in the energy-rich Middle East that adds fuel to the fire. When Muslims all over the Islamic countries see that their brothers-in-faith are dying in Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Afghanistan, on an emotional level they feel outraged and seek vengeance and justice.

A fake intelligence source fooled MI6 with false reports based on the action movie 'The Rock', which ended up being used to justify Britain's invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Chilcot report has revealed.

The Chilcot report into Britain's involvement in the invasion of Iraq is highly critical of the UK intelligence services, claiming it provided the government with "flawed" information, including about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) - the basis for going to war.

In September 2002, MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove reported the agency was on the edge of a "significant breakthrough" after finding a new source inside Iraq with "phenomenal access" to information about suspected WMDs.

The source claimed senior scientists in Iraq were working seven days a week on stepping up the production of chemical and biological weaponry, and the regime was concentrating its efforts on the production of anthrax and chlorine gas.