The United States said on Feb. 20, that a woman who traveled to Syria from Alabama in 2014 to join the ISIS terror group won't be allowed back into the country.

In the first definitive answer on the subject, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said: "Ms. Hoda Muthana is not a U.S. citizen and will not be admitted into the United States."

"She does not have any legal basis, no valid U.S. passport, no right to a passport, nor any visa to travel to the United States," he added. "We continue to strongly advise all U.S. citizens not to travel to Syria."

The State Department hinted at Muthana's status on Tuesday, noting she might not be an American citizen.

Washington's pressure campaign against Russia could hypothetically result in it being cut off from the global internet, which is why the government is making contingency plans, Vladimir Putin said.

Speaking to journalists on Wednesday, the Russian president said the ongoing confrontation with the West may result in such drastic measures as Russia being isolated by the US and its allies from the worldwide web.

"I cannot say for our partners what they have on their mind. I believe such a move would damage them immensely," Putin said when asked if this scenario was possible.

The FBI's top lawyer in 2016 thought Hillary Clinton and her team should have immediately realized they were mishandling "highly classified" information based on the obviously sensitive nature of the emails' contents sent through her private server. And he believed she should have been prosecuted until "pretty late" in the investigation, according to a transcript of his closed-door testimony before congressional committees last October.

Former FBI general counsel James Baker said high-level officials at the bureau were "arguing about" whether to bring charges against Clinton, "I think, up until the end" -- and he initially thought Clinton's behavior was "alarming" and "appalling."

Pursuant to the "statutes that we were considering at the time," Baker told lawmakers, it was "the nature and scope of the classified information that, to me, initially, when I looked at it, I thought these folks should know that this stuff is classified, that it was alarming what they were talking about, especially some of the most highly classified stuff."

The chancellor, Philip Hammond, has said the UK's relationship with China "has not been made simpler" by the defence secretary's threat to deploy a warship to the Pacific.

In a thinly veiled rebuke to Gavin Williamson, Hammond told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that decisions about the deployment of aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth should be a matter for the national security council.

Beijing reportedly pulled out of trade talks with Hammond earlier this monthafter Williamson announced that the carrier, carrying F-35 Lightning stealth jets, would be deployed to the region on its maiden operational voyage. Beijing has been involved in a dispute over navigation rights and territorial claims in the South China Sea.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., recently moved into a luxury apartment complex in Washington, D.C. that does not offer the affordable housing units that were a key plank in the New York congresswoman's campaign platform.

Ocasio-Cortez, 29, who said in November that she was concerned about being able to afford rent in D.C., now earns a $174,000 annual salary and is living in a newly built high-rise in the city's Navy Yard area, the Washington Free Beacon reported last week.

The freshman congresswoman, a self-described socialist, campaigned on a platform to expand affordable housing, and her controversial Green New Deal proposal promises "Safe, affordable, adequate housing" for all.

But Ocasio-Cortez's new building - built by leading D.C. developer WC Smith - is part of a luxury complex whose owners specifically do not offer affordable units under Washington, D.C.'s Affordable Dwelling Units program. The Washington Examiner is not naming the building or complex.

Customs at China's northern port of Dalian has banned imports of Australian coal and will cap overall coal imports from all sources to the end of 2019 at 12 million tonnes, an official at Dalian Port Group told Reuters on Thursday.

The indefinite ban on imports from top supplier Australia, effective since the start of February, comes as major ports elsewhere in China prolong clearing times for Australian coal to at least 40 days.

Australia's ties with China have deteriorated since 2017, when Canberra accused China of meddling in its domestic affairs. Tensions rose again last month after Australia rescinded the visa of a prominent Chinese businessman, just months after barring Chinese telecoms giant Huawei Technologies from supplying equipment to its 5G broadband network.

Coal is Australia's biggest export earner and the Australian dollar tumbled more than 1 percent to as low as $0.7086 on fears the Dalian ban would hurt its already slowing economy.

The Venezuelan Minister of Popular Power of Oil and President of state-owned company Oils of Venezuela (PDVSA), Manuel Quevedo, has denounced an attack against the pumping station Orinoco 50 of PDVSA in Monagas state.

"Yesterday we listened to the war allocation by the U.S. President, and call to violence, and now we start to see that violence and terrorist attacks," stated Minister Quevedo on Tuesday. According to Minister Manuel Quevedo, "the act of sabotage did not result in human losses or injuries of any kind."

Having studied Soviet political history for decades and having lived off and on in that repressive political system before Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms - in Russia under Leonid Brezhnev in the late 1970s and early 1980s - I may be unduly concerned about similar repressive trends I see unfolding in democratic America during three years of mounting Russiagate allegations. Or I may exaggerate them. Even if I am right about Soviet-like practices in the United States, they are as yet only adumbrations, and certainly nothing as repressive as they once were in Russia.

And yet, ominous trends are not to be discounted and still less ignored. I have commented on them previously, on the official use of "informants" to infiltrate Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, for example, and such practices have now multiplied. Consider the following:

Soviet authorities, through the KGB, regularly charged and punished dissidents and other unacceptably independent citizens with linguistic versions of "collusion" and "contacts" with foreigners, particularly Americans. (Having inadvertently been the American in several cases, I can testify that the "contacts" were entirely casual, professional, or otherwise innocent.) Is something similar under way here? As the former prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy has pointed out, to make allegations of Trump associates' "collusion" is to question "everyone who had interacted with Russia in the last quarter-century." In my case and those of not a few scholarly colleagues, it would mean in the last half-century, or nearly. Nor is this practice merely hypothetical or abstract. The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence recently sent a letter to an American professor and public intellectual demanding that this person turn over "all communications [since January 2015] with Russian media organizations, their employees, representatives, or associates," with "Russian persons or business interests," "with or about US political campaigns or entities relating to Russia," and "related to travel to Russia, and/or meetings, or discussions, or interactions that occurred during such travel." We do not know how many such letters the Committee has sent, but this is not the only one. If this is not an un-American political inquisition, it is hard to say what would be. (It was also a common Soviet practice, though such "documents" were usually obtained by sudden police raids, of which there have recently been at least two in our own country, both related to Russiagate.)

The Russian Industrial Zone in Egypt will be launched in late 2020 - early 2021, Head of the Suez Canal Authority Mohab Mamish told TASS.

According to him, the industrial zone will be "launched by the end of 2020 - beginning of 2021."

According to Mamish, enterprises manufacturing agricultural machinery that is in demand in the Egyptian market will be located in the Russian industrial zone. According to him, such products will be in demand not only in the Egyptian market, but also in the markets of other African countries, as well as the Middle East and Europe.

Press service of the Ministry of Industry and Trade of Russia said earlier that the first eight companies would sign an agreement on participation in the Russian industrial zone in Egypt on February 19. According to the report, the Russian Minister of Industry and Trade Denis Manturov said that the first portfolio of eight agreements of intent with interested companies would be signed by Russian Export Center as part of the planned "Presentation of the export potential of the Russian industrial zones in Egypt" on February 19, 2019.

Germany has rejected a plea by the UK foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, to resume arms sales to Saudi Arabia, denying that its embargo weakens Europe's credibility or harms the European defence industry.


At a joint press conference with the German foreign minister, Heiko Maas, Hunt was told his plea for a resumption of arms sales made in a leaked letter had been rejected for the moment.

Maas said any future decision would be "dependent on developments in the Yemen conflict and whether what was agreed in the Stockholm peace talks are implemented".

The two sides in the Yemen civil war met in Sweden last December to start a process of confidence building, including a limited ceasefire in the Red Sea port of Hodeidah. The UN special envoy to Yemen, Martin Griffiths, has not yet set a date for the resumption of the main talks, and few expect a settlement for many months.

Hunt raised the issue with Maas in talks that had been expected to be dominated by Brexit. At the joint press conference in Berlin, he ruled out imposing an arms sales embargo in the UK.