In 1998, Bill Clinton ordered the bombing of a medicine factory in Sudan. The country has yet to recover.

Before fourteen cruise missiles turned it into a heap of twisted steel and medical detritus, the Al Shifa factory in Khartoum was the largest manufacturer of medicines in all of Sudan, producing over half of the country's pharmaceutical products and specializing in anti-malaria drugs. But on August 20, 1998, the plant was "pulverized," reduced to nothing but "broken concrete and iron bars," leaving "thousands of brown bottles of veterinary and other medicines" littered across the sand. Fourteen years later, its wreckage remained, a shrine to an incident that locals still refer to as a terrorist attack.

The Al Shifa plant had been taken out on the direct orders of Bill Clinton. The strike was in retaliation for Osama bin Laden's recent bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In addition to destroying the Al Shifa, the administration targeted a group of Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan.

Investigative journalist Pepe Escobar says Trump has no clear insight into the world economy, and adopts policies which are accelerating the process to end the rule of the US Dollar as the world reserve currency.

Speaking in an exclusive interview with FNA, Pepe Escobar said Beijing may choose the "nuclear option" and trade the oil only in the yuan, "this could be collapse of the petro-dollar. Then, we will have the beginning of a new era of international relations that will be the near end of the Dollar as the world reserve currency".

Pepe Escobar is a Brazilian journalist and the correspondent-at-large at Asia Times. He has extensively covered the central Asia, and the Middle East developments. He appears as an analyst on various TV channels.

Below is the full text of the interview:

President Donald Trump on July 30 accused Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and other Baltimore politicians of wasting and stealing billions of dollars sent to the city in federal aid.

"It's been misspent. It's been missing. It's been stolen with a lot of corrupt government. And as you know, Cummings has been in charge," the president told reporters on the White House lawn.

"I think that Representative Cummings should take his Oversight Committee and start doing oversight in Baltimore. He'd find out some real things," Trump added.

Our Reigning Political Puppets, Dancing to Invisible Strings
The death of Sen. John McCain last August revealed some important truths about the nature of our establishment media.

McCain's family had released word of his incurable brain cancer many months earlier and his passing at age 84 was long expected, so media outlets great and small had possessed all the time necessary for producing and polishing the packages they eventually published, and that was readily apparent from the voluminous nature of the tributes that they ran. The New York Times, still our national newspaper of record, allocated more than three full pages of its printed edition to the primary obituary, and this was supplemented by a considerable number of other articles and sidebars. I cannot recall any political figure other than an American president whose passing had ever received such an enormous wealth of coverage, and perhaps even some former residents of the Oval Office might have fallen short of that standard. Although I certainly didn't bother reading all of the tens of thousands of words in the Times or my other newspapers, the coverage of McCain's life and career seemed exceptionally laudatory across the mainstream media, liberal and conservative alike, with scarcely a negative word appearing anywhere outside the political fringe.

On the face of it, such undiluted political love for McCain might seem a bit odd to those who have followed his activities over the last couple of decades. After all, the Times and most of the other leading lights of our media firmament are purportedly liberal and claim to have become vehement critics of our disastrous Iraq War and other military adventures, let alone the calamitous possibility of an attack upon Iran. Meanwhile, McCain was universally regarded as the leading figure in America's "War Party," eagerly supporting all prospective and retrospective military endeavors with gleeful fury, and even making his chant of "Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran" the most widely remembered detail of his unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign. So either our major media outlets somehow overlooked such striking differences on an absolutely central issue, or perhaps their true positions on certain matters are not exactly what they seem to be, and merely constitute elements of a Kabuki-performance aimed at deceiving their more naive readers.

Even more remarkable were the discordant facts airbrushed out of McCain's history.

As the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and two George Polk awards, the late Sydney Schanberg was widely regarded as one of the greatest American war correspondents of the twentieth century. His exploits during our ill-fated Indo-Chinese War had become the basis of the Oscar-winning film The Killing Fields, which probably established him as the most famous journalist in America after Woodward and Bernstein of Watergate fame, and he had also served as a top editor at The New York Times. A decade ago, he published his greatest expose, providing a mountain of evidence that America had deliberately left behind hundreds of POWs in Vietnam and he fingered then-presidential candidate John McCain as the central figure in the later official cover-up of that monstrous betrayal. The Arizona senator had traded on his national reputation as our best-known former POW to bury the story of those abandoned prisoners, permitting America's political establishment to escape serious embarrassment. As a result, Sen. McCain earned the lush rewards of our generous ruling elites, much like his own father Admiral John S. McCain, Sr., who had led the cover-up of the deliberate 1967 Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty, which killed or wounded over 200 American servicemen.

The pound slumped for a fourth day as investor concerns over a no-deal Brexit intensified.

Sterling continued its slide versus both the dollar and the euro, with investors pricing a higher chance of the U.K. crashing out of the European Union on Oct. 31. As differences between the two sides increase, Prime Minister Boris Johnson's office said the U.K. will push the EU to negotiate a better divorce deal while preparing the country to leave the bloc without one if he fails.

"The biggest threat to the pound for the remainder of this year is the risk of an accidental no-deal Brexit," Credit Agricole SA strategists, including Valentin Marinov, wrote in a note to clients. "We continue to estimate a long-term fair value for pound-dollar that is consistent with a disruptive Brexit outcome of around 1.20."

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was named by the US as one of the main architects of the 9/11 attacks and is currently being held at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba, recently indicated that he would consider helping 9/11 victims in their lawsuit against Saudi Arabia if the US government decides not to seek the death penalty against him.

Mohammed's offer was filed in the US District Court in Manhattan Friday as part of a federal lawsuit against the Saudi government by victims and families of victims of the 2001 terrorist attacks, which killed over 3,000 people in New York, northern Virginia, and Pennsylvania.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs contacted three out of five Guantanamo Bay detainees accused of being involved in the terrorist attacks to obtain depositions, according to the Wall Street Journal. Mohammed's attorney said he would not consent to a deposition under current circumstances but noted that "in the absence of a potential death sentence, much broader cooperation would be possible."

Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem caused a social media storm on Tuesday when they posted photos of a 4-year-old Palestinian boy being taken to an Israeli police station for interrogation, escorted by his family and locals from his hometown of al-Issawiya.

The boy, identified by local media as Mohammad Elayyan, was allegedly summoned by Israeli police along with his father for questioning in regards to the boy's participation in stone-throwing at police vehicles during a raid on the town.

The prospect of John Ratcliffe as the new US director of national intelligence has Democrats and the media alarmed far more so than usual, perhaps because as DNI he could expose things they would prefer to stay hidden.

US President Donald Trump announced on Saturday that he would nominate Congressman Ratcliffe (R-Texas) to head the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), to replace Daniel Coats after he leaves on August 15. Ratcliffe has accepted Trump's nomination, and now faces the Senate confirmation process.

There is some confusion as to who will serve as acting director; Trump said he will appoint someone "soon" but critics say the 2004 law establishing the office specifically says the principal deputy - in this case, CIA veteran Sue Gordon - shall be in charge.

It has become the new normal that every Trump nomination is met by howls of outrage from both Democrats and the mainstream media. They seem to be alarmed by Ratcliffe far more than usual, however. Amazingly, despite the complete catastrophe that 'Russiagate' has turned into for the Democrats, liberal pundits are once again arguing that this somehow helps Moscow. Here's Atlantic writer Adam Serwer claiming Coats is being replaced because he was trying to "prevent foreign attacks on American elections."

Despite termination of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty soon, deployment of new missiles is unlikely but a disrupted security environment may give rise to provocative incidents "inviting" Russia to "partake." Given that there is a low probability that the US will change its stance of issuing ultimatums to Russia, the treaty will be terminated in August.

Although the INF didn't reflect the current global order as it applied only to the US and the successor states of the Soviet Union, European nations perceived it as a security guarantee against dangerous military buildups on their soil. Hence, its ripples may affect Europe.

However, the development and deployment of ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500-5500km is ruled out in the short-term. And here are the reasons:

For years, Kenya has served as Israel's gateway to Africa. Israel has been using the strong political, economic and security relations between the two states as a way to expand its influence on the continent and turn other African nations against Palestine. Unfortunately, Israel's strategy seems, at least on the surface, to be succeeding - Africa's historically vocal support for the Palestinian struggle on the international arena is dwindling.

The continent's rapprochement with Israel is unfortunate, because, for decades, Africa has stood as a vanguard against all racist ideologies, including Zionism - the ideology behind Israel's establishment on the ruins of Palestine. If Africa succumbs to Israeli enticement and pressure to fully embrace the Zionist state, the Palestinian people would lose a treasured partner in their struggle for freedom and human rights.

But all is not lost

Last month, I visited Kenya's capital city Nairobi to partake in discussions with the country's journalists, intellectuals, human rights activists and ordinary citizens in an effort to counter some of the propaganda inflicted by Israel's hasbara machine in recent years. Keeping Israel's success in penetrating various layers of the Kenyan society in mind, I also wanted to explore whether there is still some potential for solidarity.

I was pleasantly surprised at the end of my visit, as I discovered that Israel's "success story" in Kenya and the rest of Africa is a superficial one and the affinity between Africa and Palestine is far too deep for any "charm offensive" by Israel to easily eradicate.