Jeremy Corbyn has never ordered anyone's assassination. He's never ordered an invasion of a foreign country. Benjamin Netanyahu has.

Everyone and their brother in the UK - at least the tabloid media and pro-Israel apologists - has got it into their heads that the Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn laid a wreath on the grave of the Palestinian mastermind of the Munich massacre while visiting Tunisia in 2014. Is any of this true?

Well, yeah, some of it. He was in Tunisia. He did lay a wreath. He did honour the memories of dead Palestinians. But nothing beyond that. He laid a wreath that commemorated the 60 Palestinians and Tunisians who died in an Israeli revenge attack on PLO headquarters in Tunis. He did not lay a wreath at the grave of Salah Khalaf, also known as Abu Iyad, the former deputy to Yasser Arafat, who was assassinated by Israel in 1991 and who is buried nearby in the same cemetery.

Latest figures from the US Treasury Department show that Russia and Turkey are not the only countries to dump US debt bonds. Washington's second-biggest creditor, Japan, is doing the same.

Tokyo dumped $82.9 billion, or seven percent of its US Treasuries holdings, over the twelve months ending in June - the latest month for which data is available.

In June alone, the country sold off $18.4 billion worth of the US securities. Japan's holding as of June totals $1.03 trillion, the lowest since October 2011, though the country still remains the second-biggest holder of US debt.

China, the biggest holder of the US sovereign debt at $1.178 trillion, sold $4.4 billion worth of the US bonds in June. Since October 2011, China's share of US Treasuries has declined by $138 billion. A fairly insignificant amount, but the escalating trade conflict with Washington could prompt Beijing to start massively dumping its holdings. The move could spell disaster for the US financial system.

The June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between high-ranking members of the Republican presidential campaign staff and a Russian lawyer with Kremlin ties remains the cornerstone of claims that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election.

A growing body of evidence, however, indicates that the meeting may have been a setup -- part of a broad effort to tarnish the Trump campaign involving Hillary Clinton operatives employed by Kremlin-linked figures and Department of Justice officials. This view, that the real collusion may have taken place among those who arranged the meeting rather than the Trump officials who agreed to attend it, is supported by two disparate lines of evidence pulled together for the first time here: newly released records and a pattern of efforts to connect the Trump campaign to Russia.

The first line of evidence includes emails, texts, and memos recently turned over to Congress by the Department of Justice. They show how closely senior Justice Department officials and the Federal Bureau of Investigation worked with employees of Fusion GPS, a Washington-based research firm reportedly paid $1 million by Clinton operatives to dig up dirt on the Trump campaign.

By maintaining an ISIS pocket in the territory it occupies, the U.S. can continue to justify its illegal presence in the country for the long-term, ultimately substituting Iran for ISIS as its new regional boogeyman.

A recent report from the UN Security Council's Sanctions Monitoring Team has found that many of the places in Syria where the terror group Daesh (ISIS) continues to operate, recuperate and extract oil for profit are in areas of the country occupied by the United States.

According to the report's executive summary:

Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), having been defeated militarily in Iraq and most of the Syrian Arab Republic during 2017, rallied in early 2018 [owing to] a loss of momentum by forces fighting it in the east of the Syrian Arab Republic, which prolonged access by ISIL to resources and gave it breathing space to prepare for the next phase of its evolution into a global covert network."

While the text itself doesn't explicitly state who controls these areas of Syrian territory, maps of eastern Syria make it clear that the pockets of Daesh within U.S.-controlled territory have remained unchanged in size since November 2017 while the Daesh pockets in the Syrian government-controlled portion of eastern Syria have shrunk considerably since last November.

Israeli police have confirmed that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was questioned on Friday as part of the investigation into the Bezeq-Walla corruption affair, also known as Case 4000.

"We confirm that the prime minister was questioned in his residence in Jerusalem within the framework of the investigation run by Lahav 433 police unit and the securities department," the press release said, adding that the questioning lasted for several hours.

In February, former Netanyahu spokesman Nir Hefetz, and Shlomo Filber, the ex-director of the communications ministry, were arrested on suspicion of promoting regulatory benefits worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Israeli telecom company Bezeq in return for favorable coverage of the prime minister on Bezeq's highly popular news site, Walla. Bezeq chairman Shaul Elovitch is also in custody, along with his wife, son and other Bezeq executives.

Netanyahu himself has not yet been named as a suspect in the case. Today's questioning is the 11th for Netanyahu in a series of corruption probes.

Pakistani lawmakers has voted to elect former cricket star and longtime politician Imran Khan as the country's next prime minister.

In the vote at the National Assembly, Khan secured 176 votes, defeating opposition candidate Shahbaz Sharif of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party, who got 96 votes. Khan's Tehrik-e Insaf party won the most seats in Pakistan's July 25 general elections.

Parliament's move cleared the way for the 65-year-old Khan to set up a coalition government, after his party fell short of the 172 seats needed to control an outright majority.

Khan, a populist who ran on an anticorruption platform, promised voters a "new Pakistan."

The dramatic, and seemingly unstoppable, surge of Taliban offensives across Afghanistan is proof that the US is fast becoming the latest foreign power to succumb to failure in a land known for being the "graveyard of empires".

But unlike past empires defeated in Afghanistan, the US stands out as singularly contributing to its own ill-fate through excessive blundering and its legacy of criminal duplicity.

In particular, Washington's obsession with confronting neighboring Iran and plotting regime change in Tehran could well be the tipping point in Afghanistan. The point, that is, where the US tips itself into a strategic, military grave it has been digging in Afghanistan over the past two decades.

After 17 years of US military occupation costing the US taxpayer trillions of dollars, the Taliban insurgents seem to be able to launch spectacular attacks at will against the Washington-backed government in Kabul. By any measure, that portends a historic defeat for Washington's imperial ambitions. And not just in Afghanistan.

The primary challenge that Benitez will face is to arrive at agreements with the opposition.

Mario Abdo Benitez was sworn in Tuesday morning in Asuncion; the 46-years-old former senator was elected in April with 46 percent of the vote representing the right-wing Colorado Party.

Abdo Benítez was sworn-in by the president of the Congress, Silvio Ovelar, after the vice president of the country, Hugo Velazquez, took his oath. The ceremony was attended by several foreign dignities, Evo Morales (Bolivia), Mauricio Macri (Argentina), Ivan Duque (Colombia), Tabare Vazquez (Uruguay), Tsai Ing-wen (Taiwán), among others.


"I want to show that my commitment is to the future of the Republic, I come to respect the institutions," said Benitez in a press conference moments before the swearing-in ceremony.

The US Department of Defense is working with Congress on the issue of US military involvement in attacks in Yemen that have resulted in civilian casualties and provides such information when requested, Pentagon spokeswoman Lt. Cmdr. Rebecca Rebarich told Sputnik on Thursday.

When asked whether the Pentagon considers opening such an investigation, Rebarich said, "We continue to work with Congress on this issue and provide them information when requested."

Earlier in the week, US Congressman Ted Lieu wrote in a letter to the Defense Department's Acting Inspector General that the Pentagon should open an investigation into the US military's involvement in attacks in Yemen that have led to multiple civilian casualties.

Lieu said in the letter the National Defense Authorization Act for the fiscal year 2019 allocates resources for a review of the actions of US armed forces and their partners in Yemen.

A year has passed since highly credentialed intelligence professionals produced the first hard evidence that allegations of mail theft and other crimes attributed to Russia rested on purposeful falsification and subterfuge. The initial reaction to these revelations - a firestorm of frantic denial - augured ill, and the time since has fulfilled one's worst expectations. One year later we live within an institutionalized proscription of proven reality. Our discourse consists of a series of fence posts and taboos. By any detached measure, this lands us in deep, serious trouble. The sprawl of what we call "Russia-gate" now brings our republic and its institutions to a moment of great peril - the gravest since the McCarthy years and possibly since the Civil War. No, I do not consider this hyperbole.

Much has happened since Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity published its report on intrusions into the Democratic Party's mail servers on Consortium News on July 24 last year. Parts of the intelligence apparatus - by no means all or even most of it - have issued official "assessments" of Russian culpability. Media have produced countless multi-part "investigations," "special reports," and what-have-yous that amount to an orgy of faulty syllogisms. Robert Mueller's special investigation has issued two sets of indictments that, on scrutiny, prove as wanting in evidence as the notoriously flimsy intelligence "assessment" of January 6, 2017.

Indictments are not evidence and do not need to contain evidence. That is supposed to come out at trial, which is very unlikely to ever happen. Nevertheless, the corporate media has treated the indictments as convictions.

Numerous sets of sanctions against Russia, individual Russians, and Russian entities have been imposed on the basis of this great conjuring of assumption and presumption. The latest came last week, when the Trump administration announced measures in response to the alleged attempt to murder Sergei and Yulia Skripal, a former double agent and his daughter, in England last March. No evidence proving responsibility in the Skripal case has yet been produced. This amounts to our new standard. It prompted a reader with whom I am in regular contact to ask, "How far will we allow our government to escalate against others without proof of anything?"

This is a very good question.