In a speech to the UN General Assembly, French President Emmanuel Macron called for multilateralism in dealing with Iran, and for countries to stop making trade deals with those outside the Paris climate accords, namely the US.

Macron's Tuesday speech was undoubtedly less scrutinized than US President Donald Trump's - which came shortly beforehand - and was thematically worlds away. While Trump celebrated the concept of sovereign nation-states and rejected "global governance," Macron called for multilateralism in diplomacy and trade.

Trump threatened Iran with even tougher sanctions, and accused Hassan Rouhani's regime of using the sanctions relief granted by the 2015 Iran Deal to "build nuclear capable missiles, increase internal repression, finance terrorism, and fund havoc and slaughter in Syria and Yemen" through proxy forces.

Macron on the other hand credited the deal - which granted Iran sanctions relief in exchange for a halt to its nuclear weapons program - with bringing stability to the region.

Israel has been advised to think twice before attacking Syria again, now that Damascus is being equipped with S-300 long-range surface-to-air missile systems, the country's deputy foreign minister has said.

Faisal Mekdad stated on Tuesday that the Russian-made S-300 systems will act as a persuasive deterrent to any further Israeli attacks against Syria - while emphasizing that the air-defense systems would be used only if Syria was attacked.

"Israel, which got used to carrying out many attacks under different pretexts, would have to recalculate and reconsider before attacking again," Mekdad told Xinhua news agency. "Let the Israelis try [to attack] and we will defend ourselves as we have done before."

Republican Senator Rand Paul will introduce an amendment that would lift existing US sanctions on members of Russia's Federal Assembly if Moscow agrees to nix its own sanctions targeting US lawmakers, according to the Daily Beast.

Paul will present the legislation during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting on Wednesday, the Daily Beast, which obtained the text of the amendment, reported.

But with Democratic members still in full Russiagate mode, it's unlikely that the amendment will make it past committee. Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen, who is currently banned from traveling to Russia, told the Daily Beast that she saw no need for the amendment, claiming that it would merely be "a capitulation to Putin's aggression."

The legislation, however, has a simple, practical purpose - to allow Russian lawmakers to visit the US and confer with their American counterparts.

Paul is one of a handful of top US lawmakers who have called for more dialogue with Moscow. The Kentucky senator made two separate visits to Moscow - the first in July, followed by a second visit the next month - to find "common ground with [Russian] leaders and help prevent further, unnecessary escalation of tensions."

In conference speech Labour leader to lay out plans to change direction of economy

Jeremy Corbyn will on Wednesday attack the "greed-is-good" capitalism that he claims has resulted in large swaths of the UK being left behind, promising a raft of new policies including a "green jobs revolution" that will create 400,000 new positions.

The Labour leader will attempt to reset the theme of the Labour conference which has so far been dominated by deep divisions over its Brexit stance and return to his core argument about the failure of the broken economic system.

Corbyn will use his main conference speech to set out his plans to change the direction of the economy, following a week in which his shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, laid out a series of redistributive policies.

During the past several years, there has been increased pressure coming from some in the federal government aided and abetted powerful advocacy groups in the private sector to police social and alternative media. It is a multi-pronged attack on the First Amendment which has already limited the types of information that Americans have access to, thereby narrowing policy options to suit those in power

The process has been ostensibly driven by concerns over alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election, but it is really about who controls and limits the public's right to know what is going on out of sight in Washington and New York City, where politics and money come together. If one is interested in the free flow of information and viewpoints that comes with the alternative media, it certainly does not look that way. Robert Parry described it as a deliberate process of "demonizing and silencing dissent that questions mainstream narratives."

Last October top executives from Facebook, Google and Twitter were summoned to Capitol Hill for a discussion of their role in what is alleged to be Russia's influence on the presidential campaign and went back home contrite and promising to improve. They have indeed improved by punishing members whose views have been found to be unacceptable, blocking them and suspending their access to the sites. Meanwhile, the federal government for its part has attempted to silence independent non-U.S. based voices by declaring Russian media outlets RT America and Sputnik to be "foreign agents," requiring them to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA). It is an unprecedented action against a news agency and invites quid-pro-quo for U.S. media operating overseas, leaving the American public more ignorant of world affairs than it already is.

Qatar based Al-Jazeera, which has been particularly targeted by Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as "a major exporter of hate against the Jewish people," will also be required to register with FARA to comply with the new National Defense Authorization Act. Al-Jazeera, it should be noted, has employed undercover investigative journalism to expose the corruption of Britain's government by Israeli supported Jewish groups. It's similar series on the activity of Zionist lobbyists in America is on hold due to threats from Jewish organizations to severely punish the network if the documentary should ever be aired.

The head of Russia's main national security body has said that Islamic State seeks to destabilize the situation in Afghanistan and replay the Syrian scenario, adding that only political talks can prevent disaster.

The secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, Nikolai Patrushev, shared this information with other senior officials at the ongoing multilateral consultations on an Afghanistan settlement which are currently taking place in Kabul.

Patrushev named the activities of the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) as one of the main factors behind the deterioration of the general situation in Afghanistan.

The United States has no right to tell European companies who they can trade and develop economic relations with, according to the Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel.

"We cannot accept that the US decided the regions with which European companies can or cannot do business," Michel said in an interview with Belgian French-language broadcaster RTBF shortly after meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in New York.

The Belgian PM was the first among Western leaders to hold a bilateral meeting with the Iranian President on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. Belgium will get a two-year non-permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) as soon as next year.

Michel stressed that Belgium and the EU are not naive when it comes to the issue of Iran and regional significance of the Islamic Republic.

There's no shortage of commentators in the Western mainstream telling us how Russia planned its attack on the Skripals, or how Syria planned its chemical weapons massacres. Anyone who expresses a different opinion from this accepted narrative stands condemned and belittled as a "conspiracy theorist". But the criticism works both ways - for us it is they who are the conspiracy theorists, as well as the conspirators.

The current impasse between the UK and Russia, initiated by the Skripal poisoning on March 4^th and crystallised by the identification of two Russian "suspects" last week, calls for new thinking. Despite what appeared to most Russians - and "dissident" observers - as the complete exposure of the UK's dirty game, where its "smoking gun" evidence was quickly trashed by the appearance of the two "guns" on Russian TV, the UK's leaders and their dutiful media remained unrepentant.

What we are dealing with here is effectively two conspiracy theories, but only one conspirator. The smallest details of the UK's conspiracy theory are familiar to all of us, even if incomprehensible and stretching credibility beyond breaking point:

In a stunning vote of "no confidence" in the US monopoly over global payment infrastructure, one month ago Germany's foreign minister Heiko Maas called for the creation of a new payments system independent of the US that would allow Brussels to be independent in its financial operations from Washington and as a means of rescuing the nuclear deal between Iran and the west.

Writing in the German daily Handelsblatt, Maas said "Europe should not allow the US to act over our heads and at our expense. For that reason it's essential that we strengthen European autonomy by establishing payment channels that are independent of the US, creating a European Monetary Fund and building up an independent Swift system," he wrote.

Maas said it was vital for Europe to stick with the Iran deal. "Every day the agreement continues to exist is better than the highly explosive crisis that otherwise threatens the Middle East," he said, with the unspoken message was even clearer: Europe no longer wants to be a vassal state to US monopoly over global payments, and will now aggressively pursue its own "SWIFT" network that is not subservient to Washington's every whim.

Many discounted the proposal as being far too aggressive: after all, a direct assault on SWIFT, and Washington, would be seen by the rest of the world as clear mutiny against a US-dominated global regime, and could potentially spark a crisis of confidence in the reserve status of the dollar, resulting in unpredictable, and dire, consequences.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said his party would recognize a Palestinian state as soon as it takes office, during his speech to the party's conference in Liverpool.

To widespread applause, Corbyn said the party would recognize a state of Palestine in order to implement the UN-brokered two-state solution.

"But a quarter of a century on from the Oslo Accords we are no closer to justice or peace and the Palestinian tragedy continues, while the outside world stands by," stated Corbyn.

"As my great Israeli friend Uri Avnery who died this year put it: "What is the alternative to peace? A catastrophe for both peoples.

"And in order to help make that two-state settlement a reality we will recognize a Palestinian state as soon as we take office."