The Trump administration has backtracked on its earlier bid to build a military coalition in the Persian Gulf to counter what it called the "Iran threat", saying now that the coalition is not aimed at countering the Islamic Republic.

A top Pentagon official told Reuters on Thursday that the US Persian Gulf maritime proposal is not supposed to be a military coalition against Iran. "This is not a coalition against Iran ... If you were militarily confronting Iran, this is not the construct that you would use," said Kathryn Wheelbarger, one of the most senior policy officials at the Pentagon.

Wheelbarger, who briefed NATO allies this week on the US proposal, said the coalition is simply aimed at "shining a flashlight" in the Persian Gulf to deter attacks on commercial ships. "Just shining a flashlight on something - that's all we're asking people to do, quite frankly."

According to the senior official, the coalition is to be less operational and more geared toward increasing surveillance capabilities. "The goal is to increase maritime domain awareness and surveillance capabilities in the region to dissuade malign action," she explained.

CNN abandoned journalism and became a propaganda ministry for the Democratic National Committee and the corrupt upper echelons of the CIA and FBI. After three years of telling the most outrageous lies ever associated with an alleged news organization in an alleged democracy, CNN's viewership collapsed. CNN - turned propaganda ministry - saw its primetime viewers shrink by 40%. Even insouciant Americans could see that CNN was nothing but a lie factory.

One would have thought CNN would have learned a lesson. But apparently not. The scum or fools, whichever it is, that runs CNN decided instead to tell even more lies. The propaganda ministry concocted an even less believable story than the ones that had driven away 40% of CNN viewers. The story "reported" by Alex Marquardt goes as follows:

Assange, being a Russian spy, turned the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he had asylum into a command post for arranging a US presidential election outcome that pleased the Russians. Marquardt spins a fantasy of how Assange from his embassy base, undeterred by Ecuadoran President Correa or the Ecuadoran ambassador to the UK, and aided with deliveries of hacked materials and suspicious meetings with Russians and world-class hackers, undermined the American presidential election.

The Farsi accounts of three Iranian news agencies have been suspended on Twitter since Friday, shortly after they reported the capture of a UK-flagged tanker in the Strait of Hormuz. Twitter says the events are unrelated.


Two Farsi-language Twitter pages of Mehr News Agency, as well as pages belonging to the Young Journalists Club (YJC) and IRNA, have all been blocked on Twitter since Friday. Mehr and the YJC are semi-official news agencies, and IRNA is Iran's official government-run agency.

Mehr and IRNA's English-language accounts were still accessible as of Saturday evening.

Twitter apparently didn't tell the targeted agencies why they had been abruptly suspended, at least not immediately. Mehr said on its English website Saturday evening that it was in the dark about the reason for Twitter's crackdown, while denouncing it as "illegal."

The YJC denounced its suspension, saying the targeted agencies "had no other purpose than the publication of news and information." It reported that the accounts of other Iranian users were also suspended in the purge.

A day after the suspension, a Twitter official cited by AFP said that the agencies' accounts were blocked for "coordinated and targeted harassment" of the Baha'i religious minority in Iran.

Israel said it will allow BDS-supporting US congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib to enter the country, in a departure from its travel ban on supporters of the pro-Palestinian movement.

"Out of respect for Congress and the great alliance between Israel and America, we would not deny entry to pro-BDS congresswomen," Israel's ambassador to the US, Ron Dermer, said.

London has scored an own-goal by plunging right in the middle of the US game of nerves against Iran. The international crisis over detained tankers comes amid an awkward leadership transition at home.


Next week, Britain will have a new prime minister after Theresa May makes room for either former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson or incumbent Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt. Whoever is elected next Tory leader and head of the government will get an international crisis in his lap. And it won't be the Brexit mess that sealed the downfall of May's premiership - there is a more acute problem with Iran.

In early July, the UK captured an oil tanker carrying Iranian crude through the Strait of Gibraltar, saying it was trying to violate EU sanctions by delivering its cargo to a Syrian port. This Friday, Tehran detained a British-flagged tanker off its coast in what is widely perceived as an act of retaliation. Iran accuses the UK of doing the US' bidding as the administration of President Donald Trump ratchets up pressure on the Islamic Republic with deployment of military assets and threats of sanctions against buyers of its oil.

It's a screaming headline in BILD, with "PUTIN" installed in the banner headline for better tabloid* effect, but the story is paywalled, so your translator resorted to Ria.Novosti for the text. After the translation, I will add several comments on this news from Facebook friends in Germany.

The new head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, believes that the Nord Stream II gas pipeline project entails a too-strong risk of the EU being dependent on Russian energy resources.

Nord Stream II has "an economic and of course a political dimension," said the former head of the Federal Ministry of Defense. "There is a risk of over-reliance on Russian energy resources, other forms of energy are important for diversifying energy supplies. We need competition, and we need to take into account the interests of our eastern neighbors," von der Leyen said in an interview with the tabloid Bild.

More drugs than ever are flowing into the US from south of the border as federal resources have been diverted to the migrant crisis, leaving Border Patrol hopelessly overstretched, the US drug policy chief has warned.

"Seizures are down, and it's not because there are less drugs coming in," James Carroll, director of the US Office of Drug Control Policy, told Breitbart on Thursday, lamenting that the US' immigration system is encouraging an unmanageable influx of migrants and forcing Border Patrol to expend its resources on managing the "humanitarian need."

"Border Patrol is stretched so thin that we have miles and miles of completely unprotected border where they can just bring the drugs in en masse," Carroll warned, explaining that the drug traffickers are actually exploiting the "humanitarian thing" by sending migrants to cross in one area and sending drugs over another area while Border Patrol is distracted apprehending the migrants.

The seizure of British-owned oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz is the signal that Iran's patience has run out, due to European inaction for over a year after the US pullout from the nuclear deal, analysts told RT.

Prior to May, Iran exercised extreme restraint despite US sanctions and its frustration with Europe's failure to offset the losses they caused, Hamed Mousavi, political science professor at the University of Tehran, said.

Eventually, Iran's patience ran out, but not before the US "made sure that Iran has very few options remaining."

The charges against financier Jeffrey Epstein for sex trafficking are of course one of the biggest stories in the country these days, and Israel and its friends have been an ongoing theme in the case.

Epstein, a 66-year-old former hedge fund manager, supported many Jewish causes and Zionist organizations, and was on the board of the Wexner Foundation, which is devoted to Israel. He had friendships with many Israel supporters, from Alan Dershowitz to Howard Rubenstein to Ehud Barak to Larry Summers. And there is speculation that Epstein, a mysterious international figure, had links to Israeli intelligence.

Dershowitz, Epstein's former lawyer, says Israel is a factor in the case. Two days ago Dersh published an op-ed for Newsmax aimed at preempting the New Yorker's anticipated expose of his role in the case (one of Epstein's victims says that she was compelled to have sex with Dershowitz. He denies the charges, but he has admitted getting a massage at Epstein's mansion.). Dershowitz says the New Yorker is trying to hurt Netanyahu.

Here is Dershowitz's blockbuster lead:

I recently learned, from a source close to The New Yorker magazine, that its editor, David Remnick, has commissioned a hit piece against me for the explicit purpose of silencing my defense of President Trump, Prime Minister Netanyahu, and the State of Israel. Remnick despises Trump and Netanyahu, and is well known for his strong anti-Israel bias. Remnick explicitly told people that I must be silenced because mine has been the most persuasive voice in favor of what Remnick feels pose dangers to values he holds dear, and that he will use the credibility of The New Yorker to accomplish this goal.

This doesn't seem very plausible. Remnick can be very critical of Israel but he is a liberal Zionist. Connie Bruck is said to be the reporter on the case and though she has a pretty good track record (exposing Adelson) she is married to an Israel devotee, former Rep. Mel Levine.


Also, if Netanyahu is so hurt by the case, why is he pushing for an investigation of Epstein in the election campaign, so as to hurt his rival, Ehud Barak?

Kiev-based political analyst, Alexander Semchenko assessed the "achievements" of the Ukrainian authorities since the illegal Western-backed coup in 2014.

"Since it gained independence 28 years ago, Ukraine only managed to squander all the achievements that it inherited from the Soviet Union, and even the country's population itself was set on the path of extinction," said Alexander Semchenko, a political analyst and blogger from Kiev.

"We didn't and still don't create anything new, let alone something great. Just 16 years after the Great Patriotic War, USSR flew a man into space - a global event. Ukraine has been independent for 28 years, and what have we achieved? We destroyed the country. There was a great industrial base, the best human resources, (we were) one of the top industrial powers in the world. Ukraine was among the top ten. And what did we do with it?

Even Somalia is better than Ukraine. Last year, the Somali delegation was allowed to vote at the World Health Organization, but the Ukrainian delegation wasn't, because the Somali delegation paid off debts to WHO, and the Ukrainian delegation did not. Why does the WHO need Ukraine, with its record-breaking death rates, while Somalia now has mortality rates lower than in Ukraine? 'Excellent' achievements," Semchenko noted bitterly.

At the same time, all they do in Kiev is constantly babble about banning the Russian language, fighting the communist past, "regaining" Donbass and so on. And as soon as Ukraine achieves total Ukrainization, then "prosperity" will begin, Semchenko added sarcastically.