The Afghan government plans to complete a Taliban prisoner release to pave the way for peace talks with the militant group, President Ashraf Ghani said on June 11.

"My colleagues and I have made the decision to release an additional 2,000 prisoners within a very short period. We will announce the date soon," Ghani told the Atlantic Council's South Asia Center and the U.S. Institute for Peace via video link.

In February, the United States and the Taliban signed an agreement aimed at ending the 18-year war in Afghanistan -- the longest military conflict in U.S. history.

The deal lays out a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country in return for security commitments from the Taliban.

A Dutch Government prosecutor has told the court trying charges of murder against the Russian state, three Russian soldiers and a Ukrainian in the shooting-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 that satellite images were requested from the US, Russia and China. The Russian reply, announced yesterday in court by prosecutor Thijs Berger, was that the Russian satellite images were "not stored". The Chinese reply, he added, was that there had been a Chinese satellite above eastern Ukraine at the time of the MH17 downing, but it was "not operational". All three governments - the US, Russia, and China - refused to provide satellite images.

Thijs Berger is one of the three state prosecutors presenting the state case in the courtroom at Schiphol, which resumed open hearings on June 8. The prosecutors are expected to take several days summarizing their sources of evidence, the methods of their investigation, and the results to date. The presiding judge, Hendrik Steenhuis, announced on Monday that this is a preliminary or pre-trial procedure to enable the court to decide whether further investigations are required before the trial of the four defendants can commence.

The Dutch defence lawyers, appointed to represent the single Russian defendant Oleg Pulatov, will follow with their comments on the prosecution's case to date, and argue for Steenhuis to rule on requiring the production of additional evidence; additional time for the defence to analyse the prosecution file; and possibly summary dismissal of the charges, if the prosecution summary falls short of establishing evidence that meets the criminal law standard, required by Dutch law - proof beyond reasonable doubt.

Former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove's new role as anti-China provocateur gives us the opportunity to look into the mind of empire and see how our society is being played to acquiesce to an agenda that will ultimately lead to WW III. By adding his voice to those Anglo-American fanatics blaming China for creating COVID-19 in a lab and intentionally spreading it around the world, Sir Dearlove has demonstrated a classic case of "gang/counter-gang operations" practiced by the British Empire for centuries.

The Origins of Gang/Counter-gang Operations

British agent Frank Kitson produced an insidious little 1960 handbook called Gangs and Counter-gangs based on his work coordinating special operations against the 1955 Mau Mau uprising in Kenya which threatened to break this valuable African region free of British colonialism. Kitson's handbook was a modern adaption of a centuries-old practice according to the needs of putting down independence and civil rights movements that threatened to undo the age of empires.

During his work in Kenya, Kitson recognized that when outnumbered and faced with organized independence movements, it is just not very effective for thinly spread colonialists to try to put them down by force directly and much wiser to change the rules of the game by a slight of hand. The formula for changing the game is to cultivate one or more opposition groups to whatever force is posing a threat to the empire... and then cultivate a counter-gang to that opposition group to create a new set of conflicts within your target population (Hence the name "gang/counter-gang"). While the target society becomes polarized by the two warring (yet ultimately controlled) opposition movements, the genuine independence movement simply gets diffused and lost in the chaos.

A newly declassified document reveals FBI officials circulated sensational claims that President Trump "worked with" Russia in 2016 and that his campaign was offered "financial compensation" to drop US sanctions, but didn't disclose that the claims came from an opposition researcher for the Democrats.

The claims were made by former British spy Christopher Steele and detailed by the FBI in a classified annex to an intelligence community assessment on Russia's role in the 2016 election. CBS News first reported Thursday that the document was partially declassified by intelligence director John Ratcliffe.

Steele was paid by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign to find dirt on Trump. He leaned on a network of sources to compile a dossier of allegations including unverified rumors.

An investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller later found no evidence that Trump colluded with Russia including on the distribution of hacked Democratic emails.

In a fractious election year that has already witnessed Russiagate, impeachment and a pandemic, Americans are now forced to contend with the malignant scourge of rioting and looting following the killing of George Floyd at the hands of a white cop. Now, many Democrats seem content to the let the whole house burn down to achieve some sort of twisted justice .

To get a true sense of the mob mentality that is now leading the United States straight to the abyss, you could do no worse than a visit to the nation's embattled capital. There, District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser recently evicted 1,200 members of the National Guard from hotels where they had been staying during their brief deployment, which included everything from cleaning graffiti from buildings to patrolling the streets.

The Iraqi parliament back in January demanded that all foreign troops leave the country after the US conducted an unsanctioned airstrike near Baghdad International Airport to kill Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, who was in the country on a diplomatic mission.

The US-led coalition, with the exception of American troops, recently halved its military presence in Iraq, cutting it down to 1,200 troops in light of the coronavirus pandemic, a New York Times report shows.

According to the newspaper, the US is also looking for a way to reduce the number of its troops in the country to a bare minimum. However, Washington has stopped short of discussing a complete withdrawal from the Middle East country, despite the demands from its parliament.

"We're going to continue to maintain forces as long as the Iraqi government is willing to have US and coalition forces present in the country until the enduring defeat of Daesh* is accomplished, and it's not yet accomplished", special US envoy to the region James Jeffrey said.

White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said Covid-19 turned out to be his "worst nightmare" come to life as the coronavirus continues to rapidly spread across the globe.

The virus is "something that's highly transmissible. ... In a period — if you just think about it — in a period of four months, it has devastated the world," Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview with the BIO Digital virtual health-care conference that aired Tuesday.

AIPAC Tells Lawmakers It's Okay to Criticize Annexation

If you're a U.S. politician who opposes annexation, but has been waiting for permission from the biggest pro-Israel lobby group to actually criticize it, I have some good news for you: This week AIPAC announced that such comments were fine to make, assuming they don't go too far.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reported that AIPAC is providing lawmakers with this guidance over Zoom meetings and phone calls. The parameters are pretty obvious: you can say annexation is bad, but you can't actually suggest conditioning military aid or holding Israel accountable in any way. "So far, the group has remained publicly silent about annexation," writes Ron Kampeas, "But in private, AIPAC is telling lawmakers that as long as they don't push to limit the United States' aid to Israel, they can criticize the annexation plan without risking tensions or a clash with the lobby group."

AIPAC has been dealing with a PR problem in recent years and this move should probably be understood in that context. A majority of Democratic voters support conditioning aid to Israel, more and more lawmakers skip their annual conference now, and Netanyahu's close relationship with Trump has further eroded Israel's brand.

On December 19, 2016 Andrei Karlov, who had been the Russian Ambassador to Turkey since 2013, was murdered by off-duty police officer Mevlüt Mert Altıntaş at an art exhibition in the Turkish capital of Ankara. After gunning down Karlov, Altıntaş was heard saying "Do not forget Aleppo, do not forget Syria" and "We die in Aleppo, you die here." This was in reference to the November-December 2016 operation by the Syrian Army and its allies, including Russia, to liberate jihadist-held areas of southern and eastern Aleppo.

Turkey claimed that FETÖ, an Islamic movement led by Fetullah Gülen who was a former ally of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan but now turned enemy, was to blame for the murder. Ankara's prosecution office claimed that Altıntaş had ties to FETÖ and wanted to push Russia and Turkey to "the brink of war."

Russo-Turkish relations rapidly deteriorated when on November 24, 2015 Turkey shot down a Russian military jet in Syrian airspace, resulting in the death of a pilot. A Russian soldier was also killed during the operation to rescue the second pilot. Although Turkey did not shy away from taking full responsibility for the incident, Russian Academy of Sciences senior official Ruslan Kurbanov claimed the order to down the Russian plane was given by a Gülenist Turkish Colonel in the NATO-controlled Incirlik Air Base in southeast Turkey. Other high-profile Russians made the same claim.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday called for the removal of Confederate statues in the nation's Capitol building after renewed calls to remove them from public spaces following the death of George Floyd.

The California Democrat wrote a letter to the Joint Committee on the Library, which oversees statues in the U.S. Capitol, calling for the removal of the artifacts because they lionize America's slaveholding era.

"[T]he halls of Congress are the very heart of our democracy. The statues in the Capitol should embody our highest ideals as Americans, expressing who we are and who we aspire to be as a nation," Pelosi said in the letter. "Monuments to men who advocated cruelty and barbarism to achieve such a plainly racist end are a grotesque affront to these ideals. Their statues pay homage to hate, not heritage. They must be removed."