An Israeli missile struck a target in the Syrian province of Quneitra on Monday; the attack caused a number of casualties, the SANA news agency reported.

"An Israeli missile targeted Tel al-Shaar in Quneitra," the Syrian news agency stated, noting further that a "military vehicle was targeted and there are wounded".

After reports about the attack emerged, the IDF confirmed that it was behind the air strike on Syria.

It's difficult to gauge the impact of elections to the European Parliament (EP) on politics in Europe, primarily because the EP was designed to not have much of an impact on politics in Europe. Voters know this, which is why overall turnout at EP elections has fallen at every consecutive election since high interest in the first EU-wide vote in 1979. However, this year turnout rose for the first time, to 52%, and it comes at a time when the Parliament's powers are expanding to, de facto, take on the ability to propose legislation.

The overall result from this weekend's voting is being spun in the media as the successful arrest of 'populist' anti-EU parties. However, it's noteworthy that the two biggest voting blocs (the centre-right coalition of nominally conservative parties, and the nominally centre-left coalition of socialist/democratic parties) have, for the first time in 40 years, lost their (combined) traditional majority.

Not that they're not going to lose any sleep over that though: the 'traditional centre' can rely on new allies because the Green and Liberal blocs increased their share of seats. This means that, in the coming 5-year term, the 'majority vote' at the EU level will be more of the same 'neo-liberal centrism', only 'leftier' - so, expect more corporatism, more 'saving the planet', and much more 'social justice'.

BBC has a useful breakdown of results by country here

The British government has prepared for terrorist incidents by pre-planning social media campaigns that are designed to appear to be a spontaneous public response to attacks, Middle East Eye has learned.

Hashtags are carefully tested before attacks happen, Instagram images selected, and "impromptu" street posters are printed.

In operations that contingency planners term "controlled spontaneity", politicians' statements, vigils and inter-faith events are also negotiated and planned in readiness for any terrorist attack.


The campaigns have been deployed during every terrorist incident in recent years including the 2017 London Bridge attack and the Finsbury Park mosque attack.

Former CIA Chief John Brennan still has his security clearance even though President Trump revoked it last summer.

Last July White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders announced at a press briefing that President Trump was reviewing the process to revoke the security clearances of several Deep State critics for abusing their post-government retention of security clearances by lying about Trump and Russia, as well as politicizing and monetizing their security clearances.

A month later Sarah Sanders announced at a presser that John Brennan's security clearance had been revoked.

"Historically, former heads of intelligence and law enforcement agencies have been allowed to retain access to classified information after their government service so that they can consult with their successors regarding matters about which they may have special insights and as a professional courtesy. Neither of these justifications supports Mr. Brennan's continued access to classified information," Sanders said.

According to a report out by the New York Times, John Brennan still has his security clearance because the White House never followed through with the complex bureaucratic work it would have taken to strip the clearance.

Commentary

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the court created to oversee its implementation are going to be in the news quite a bit in the upcoming weeks.

This is because the FISA court plays a central role in the ongoing Spygate scandal, which is only the biggest political scandal in the history of the United States, dwarfing even the Nixon Watergate scandal.

New evidence has surfaced that it wasn't only former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page who was the subject of FISA court hearings during the 2016 presidential campaign. At least three other persons in the Trump campaign were targets of FISA court hearings, according to a member of Congress who sits on the House Judiciary Committee.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) helpfully revealed that during her questioning of former Attorney General Loretta Lynch in a closed-door hearing of the House Judiciary Committee on Dec. 19, 2018.

The rule of law has given way to law as a weapon in the hands of government

Everyone who is aware of the US government's extraordinary criminal actions at home and abroad bears a heavy weight. The millions of peoples murdered, maimed, orphaned, widowed, and displaced by gratuitous American military aggression comprise a Holocaust of deaths based entirely on lies and false accusations in order to advance secret American and Israeli agendas. I suspect that the heavy burden of responsibility for mass murder and destruction committed in our name is the reason most Americans prefer the fake news fed to them about how good and wonderful and exceptional we are and how hard our government works to protect us from the nasty folks elsewhere. This storyline converts the illegal brutal war crimes of the US government against women, children, defenseless citizens, schools, wedding parties, funerals, and farmers in their fields into glorious and brave defenses of our liberty and virtue. If you want the truth watch the video leaked by Manning of US troops enjoying themselves while from the air they machine-gun reporters and innocent civilians walking along a street and follow up by machine-gunning a father and his two young children, babies, who stopped to help the wounded bleeding in the street. The leak of the video that showed the true picture of Washington's wars is the reason Manning was tortured and imprisoned. It is the person who told the truth, not the criminals who committed the murders, who was punished.

I agree that the fake story of America's moral worthiness is much easier to live with than it is to bear the shame of the true story. But in the end the fake story destroys our liberty even more completely than would conquest by a foreign opponent. People are more suspicious of an occupying power than they are of their own government and are less likely to believe foreign occupiers when they lie to them. In contrast, a people's own government can trap them in a false consciousness and keep them there with fake news.

Wherever one looks at the behavior of Americans today, from airline flight attendants to police to national security advisors and secretaries of state, one sees people devoid of moral conscience, integrity, compassion, empathy, and self-control. For unreasonable and petty spite alone, a female airline attendant on a long-delayed Southwest Airline flight called police and had a man to whom she took a dislike arrested and taken off the airplane. All of the passengers protested to the police that the arrested person had done nothing, but the cops didn't listen. They had another victim to abuse. Was the victimization of this person the result of Identity Politics teaching women to hate men?

"The fact that we are handing over the keys of American democracy to the military-industrial complex - it's like giving the keys to the henhouse to a fox and saying, 'here come in and take whatever you want.' It's obviously dangerous." - Investigative journalist Yasha Levine

Earlier this month, tech giant Microsoft announced its solution to "protect" American elections from interference, which it has named "ElectionGuard." The election technology is already set to be adopted by half of voting machine manufacturers and some state governments for the 2020 general election. Though it has been heavily promoted by the mainstream media in recent weeks, none of those reports have disclosed that ElectionGuard has several glaring conflicts of interest that greatly undermine its claim aimed at protecting U.S. democracy.

In this investigation, MintPress will reveal how ElectionGuard was developed by companies with deep ties to the U.S. defense and intelligence communities and Israeli military intelligence, as well as the fact that it is far from clear that the technology would prevent foreign or domestic interference with, or the manipulation of, vote totals or other aspects of American election systems.

Election forensics analyst and author Jonathan Simon as well as investigative journalist Yasha Levine, who has written extensively on how the military has long sought to weaponize public technologies including the internet, were consulted for their views on ElectionGuard, its connections to the military-industrial complex and the implication of those connections for American democracy as part of this investigation.

In January, MintPress published an exposé that later went viral on a news-rating company known as Newsguard. Officially aimed at fighting "fake news," the company's many connections to U.S. intelligence, a top neoconservative think tank, and self-admitted government propagandists revealed its real intention was to promote corporate media over independent alternatives.

Newsguard was among the first initiatives that comprise Microsoft's "Defending Democracy" program, a program that the tech giant created under the auspices of protecting American "democratic processes from cyber-enabled interference [which] have become a critical concern." Through its partnership with Microsoft, Newsguard has been installed in public libraries and universities throughout the country, even while private-sector companies have continued to avoid adopting the problematic browser plug-in.

Now, Microsoft is promoting a new "Defending Democracy" initiative - one equally ridden with glaring conflicts of interest - that threatens American democracy in ways Newsguard never could. ElectionGuard is touted by Microsoft as a system that aims to "make voting secure, more accessible, and more efficient anywhere it's used in the United States or in democratic nations around the world." It has since been heavily promoted by mainstream and U.S. government-funded media outlets in preparation for its use in the 2020 general election.

It is not just Trump, but the media, Obama, Bush, mainstream "human rights" organizations, Republicans and Democrats alike that put the noose around the neck of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange - threatening all journalists.

WikiLeaks publisher and political prisoner Julian Assange is facing 17 charges under the United States Espionage Act - a draconian law that was written during World War I to imprison leftists who spoke out against the mass slaughter.

How fitting, then, that 100 years later, this same ruthless statute is being used to muzzle the man who has done more than any other person alive to expose the misdeeds of the US national security state.

In its relentless assault on civil liberties, the Donald Trump administration has the dubious distinction of breaking two records at once: Indicting a journalist under the Espionage Act for the first time, and indicting a non-US citizen.

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) will come into force on Thursday. It will be the largest free trade agreement by population that the world has seen since the 1995 creation of the World Trade Organization.

The Egyptian Foreign Ministry said over the weekend that the required 22 ratifications have been received. The latest two ratifications, Sierra Leone and the Sahrawi Republic, were received by the African Union (AU) on April 29. All but three (Benin, Eritrea and Nigeria) of Africa's 55 countries have signed up to the deal. The UN said if Nigeria joins the AfCFTA then intra-African trade could grow by more than 50 percent in the next five years.

According to statistics, cited by the ministry, when the agreement enters into force it will affect more than 1.2 billion people, with a total domestic product of about $3.4 trillion. It will cut duties on 90 percent of goods on the continent. The deal could boost intra-African trade by 52.3 percent, the UN said.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame hailed it as a "new chapter in African unity."

Export of Swiss goods to Russia surged over 10 percent last year, reaching nearly 80 percent of the pre-crisis levels, according to Tobias Privitelli, the deputy head of the Swiss diplomatic mission in Russia.

The deputy ambassador added that Switzerland has been exporting vast volumes of pharmaceutical products, equipment and electronics. Mutual trade between the countries had been declining by about 13 percent from 2017 through 2018, according to Privitelli.

"However, exports from Switzerland to Russia grew by 12 percent, which is highly significant. That's 80 percent of exports volumes we had in 2013, before the crisis," he said.