The leaked OPCW report appears to have been confirmed genuine.

The report, titled "Engineering Assessment of Two Cylinders Observed at Douma Incident", came to public prominence a few days ago after The Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media released their analysis of the text.

Since then it has gotten a lot of play all across the alternate media (you can read our original report here, but there were many others too).

It has received virtually zero coverage in the mainstream media, of course. And that doesn't appear likely to change any time soon.

The U.K. raised the threat level for its armed forces and diplomats in Iraq because of an increased security risk from Iran, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The move by the British government follows a decision on Wednesday to order its non-emergency government employees to leave Iraq amid increasing Middle East tensions.

The Ministry of Defence refused to confirm the new threat level, first reported by Sky News, but said in a statement that "we keep the security of our deployed personnel and assets under constant review."

The Senate Monday may have given Gov. Ron DeSantis the perfect agenda-sweetener for his Florida Cabinet meeting next month in Jerusalem - a signing ceremony for a new Florida law requiring public schools to treat anti-Semitism as discrimination, and anti-Semitic speech and acts as racist speech and acts.

The Florida Senate unanimously approved House Bill 741 with all 39 members on the chamber floor Monday signing on as co-sponsors.

HB 741 - approved by the House 114-0 on April 11 - was substituted for its Senate companion bill, Senate Bill 1272, which had only progressed through one committee, on the Senate floor and adopted after senators consented to waive procedural rules to accelerate its passage.

The President of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro rejected and repudiated the storming of its embassy by United States police officers Thursday.

"The U.S. has raided the premises of the Venezuelan embassy in Washington ... a brutal act against international law and lack of respect for embassies in the world," said the president.

The Venezuelan head of state says he gave instructions to take its complaint of the event to the highest authorities and is expecting U.N. member states to make declarations against this violation.

Journalist Whitney Webb recently tweeted a 2010 video clip I'd never seen before featuring US National Security Advisor John Bolton defending the use of deception in advancing military agendas, which highlights something we should all be paying attention to as Trump administration foreign policy becomes increasingly Boltonized.

On a December 2010 episode of Fox News' Freedom Watch, Bolton and the show's host Andrew Napolitano were debating about recent WikiLeaks publications, and naturally the subject of government secrecy came up.

"Now I want to make the case for secrecy in government when it comes to the conduct of national security affairs, and possibly for deception where that's appropriate," Bolton said. "You know Winston Churchill said during World War Two that in wartime truth is so important it should be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies."

"Do you really believe that?" asked an incredulous Napolitano.

"Absolutely," Bolton replied.

"You would lie in order to preserve the truth?"

"If I had to say something I knew was false to protect American national security, I would do it," Bolton answered.

Opposition leader María Corina Machado, a key figure in the US coup plot, admitted that Venezuela "is not a dictatorship" and only international "humanitarian intervention" can topple Maduro.

A major right-wing opposition leader in Venezuela has acknowledged that her country "is not a dictatorship," calling it a "huge error" to claim otherwise. She also conceded that the only way the government in Caracas can realistically be toppled is through international "humanitarian intervention."

María Corina Machado has a close relationship to the US government, which has funded her opposition work. She has campaigned for years to overthrow Venezuela's leftist government, and was identified as one of the four main leaders of the US-led coup attempt initiated on January 23.

But Machado has criticized other opposition figures for characterizing the government of elected President Nicolás Maduro as a "dictatorship."

The decision by US authorities to break into Venezuela's Washington, DC embassy and arrest anti-coup activists on Wednesday is a clear violation of international law, Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin told RT.

A group calling itself the 'Embassy Protection Collective' has been under siege inside the building for weeks, as supporters of Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaido called for their removal.

Benjamin told RT that Code Pink, an anti-war activist group, received "an urgent call" from members of the 'Collective' on Wednesday morning saying "police had broken down the door and that they were going to be arrested."

How bloated defense budgets gut our armed forces

For a country that spends such vast sums on its national security apparatus-many times more than the enemies that supposedly threaten it do - the United States has a strangely invisible military establishment. Military bases tend to be located far from major population centers. The Air Force's vast missile fields, for instance, are hidden away in the plains of the northern Midwest. It is rare to see service uniforms on the streets of major cities, even Washington. Donald Trump did dream of holding a "beautiful" military parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, complete with "a lot of planes going over and a lot of military might," but the Pentagon nixed the scheme by putting out word that the extravaganza would cost $92 million. The estimate was surely inflated - ­it was four times greater, in real dollars, than the price tag for the 1991 Gulf War victory parade - suggesting that the military prefers a lower profile. It often takes an informed eye to appreciate signs of defense dollars at work, such as the office parks abutting Route 28 south of Dulles Airport, heavily populated with innocuously titled military and intelligence firms.

Largely out of sight, our gargantuan military machine is also increasingly out of mind, especially when it comes to the ways in which it spends, and misspends, our money. Three decades ago, revelations that the military was paying $435 for a hammer and $640 for an aircraft toilet seat ignited widespread media coverage and public outrage. But when it emerged in 2018 that the Air Force was now paying $10,000 for a toilet-seat cover alone, the story generated little more than a few scattered news reports and some derisive commentary on blogs and social media. (This was despite a senior Air Force official's unblushing explanation that the ridiculous price was required to save the manufacturer from "losing revenue and profit.") The Air Force now claims to have the covers 3-D-printed for $300 apiece, still an extravagant sum.

The Obama White House kept tabs on a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for information on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's email accounts that the State Department improperly denied, according to newly released emails.

The emails, which were provided to Judicial Watch, show for the first time that the Obama White House was aware of the Clinton-related FOIA request, which the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) submitted to the State Department in December 2012.

The State Department denied the request in May 2013, claiming that no responsive records existed. That despite officials at the State Department, the White House and even President Obama himself knowing that Clinton used a personal email account for government business.

US President Donald Trump has declared a national emergency over technology designed or produced by 'foreign adversaries,' an act widely understood to target China's ZTE and Huawei in an effort to freeze them out of 5G market.

Arguing that "foreign adversaries are increasingly creating and exploiting vulnerabilities in information and communications technology and services" the US increasingly depends on, Trump's executive order on Wednesday declares an emergency over foreign-designed, developed, manufactured or supplied information and communications technologies.

The emergency order gives the Secretary of Commerce the authority to block any transactions that would pose "undue risk of sabotage to or subversion" of IT or communications technologies and services, or "undue risk of catastrophic effects on the security or resiliency of... critical infrastructure or the digital economy."