Supporters of the ousted Egyptian president describe his death as 'tantamount to state sponsored murder'

Egypt's only freely elected president, the Islamist Mohamed Morsi, who was deposed in a 2013 military-backed coup d'etat, reportedly died on Monday during a court session, the nation's state television report.

The 67-year-old US-educated civil engineer and political leader of the Muslim Brotherhood was on trial facing espionage charges when he reportedly collapsed.

"The body has been transferred to a hospital and necessary procedures are underway," Nile News television said.

Tightly controlled state television reported Morsi's death by a heart attack without noting his tenure as president. According to the public prosecutor's office, Morsi collapsed in the cage used to house defendants in Egyptian courtrooms at around 4:50 pm local (2.30 pm GMT) and was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital, according to news agencies, claiming there was no sign of injuries.

Morsi's death while in custody will likely anger Muslim Brotherhood supporters throughout the Middle East and have international repercussions. The organisation is the oldest Islamist political organisation in the world. Morsi and the Brotherhood count Turkey and Qatar as major allies. His supporters accused the Egyptian state of killing Morsi.

Military equipment firms in the United States will likely have their supply of Chinese rare earths restricted, the Global Times said on Monday (Jun 17), after China's state economic planner confirmed industry experts have proposed export controls.

China is the world's dominant producer of rare earths - a group of 17 prized minerals used in everything from consumer electronics to military equipment such as jet engines, missile guidance systems satellites and lasers.

Numerous reports from state-run Chinese media have raised the prospect that China may limit its supplies of the minerals to gain leverage in its trade dispute with the United States.

The Global Times, a newspaper that is published by the ruling Communist Party's People's Daily, said on its official Twitter account that US military equipment companies "are likely to face restrictions", citing unidentified Chinese industry insiders.

"We have already increased our [uranium] production in Natanz. From today, the countdown has begun, and by June 27, our uranium production will have surpassed 300 kilograms," said Behrouz Kamalvandi during a press conference at Arak heavy water nuclear complex on Monday.

The decision to increase uranium production is part of Iran's measures to reduce commitments to the JCPOA following the US' unilateral withdrawal from the agreement last year, and the EU's failure to safeguard Iran's economic interests in the face of US sanctions.

We are waiting for the officials' decision on starting the second phase of measures to reduce our JCPOA-related commitments, Kamalvandi said, adding "Europeans still have time. We waited a year [for them to save the nuclear deal], which was our 'strategic patience.'"

Stressing that Iran will no longer remain patient in the face of Europeans' hesitance in complying with their commitments, the AEOI spokesman said the Europeans "either do not want to do something, or they just don't have the ability to do it."

The development comes against the backdrop of tensions between the United States and Iran that dramatically escalated last week, when Washington accused Tehran of being behind attacks on two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman.

Iran has dismantled a CIA-run "large US cyber-espionage" network, the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) reported, citing the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, Ali Shamkhani.

"Given the cooperation between the Islamic Republic of Iran and other countries in creating an 'international organisation to counter American espionage', we provided our partners with information that led to the disclosure and dismantling of a network of CIA officers, as well as detention and punishment of several spies in different countries", the senior official said.

Russia will reinforce its troops at the country's western border as a response to US plan to send additional troops to Poland, Vladimir Dzhabarov, the deputy chairman of the Russian upper house's foreign affairs committee said on Monday.

Russia would reinforce its troops at the country's western border, Vladimir Dzhabarov, the deputy chairman of the Russian upper house's foreign affairs committee, announced.

He stressed that Russia would retaliate if it faced an attack from the Polish territory.

"Poland seems not to understand this. Perhaps, it wants to be someone's military base ... In the meanwhile, US troops deployment will not anyhow contribute to the Polish security", Dzhabarov went on to say.

Sara Netanyahu, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's wife was convicted of using public money for private spendings.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's wife, Sara Netanyahu, appeared Sunday in court to admit criminal offense over the ill-usage of public funds to pay for expensive meals.

The court accepted a plea bargain in which she consented to admit having fraudulently exploited the mistakes of a government employee between 2010 and 2013, to spend more than US$100,000 of state funds on catering hundreds of meals delivered by expensive restaurants, all of this despite having an in-house cook paid by the state.

Under the agreement, a fraud charge was reduced to a smaller offense and she will pay the state 45,000 shekels (US$12,490) in reimbursement and a 10,000 shekel (US$2,775) fine in compensation. Yet corruption charges against her would be dropped.

The Grayzone's Max Blumenthal has published the first part of an investigative series on how so-called non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are being used to manipulate the narrative about what's going on in Syria by posing as impartial investigative bodies and circulating pro-imperialist disinformation to the western political/media class as objective fact. Part one is titled "Behind the Syrian Network for Human Rights: How an opposition front group became Western media's go-to monitor", and it documents a mountain of evidence that one of these "NGOs" is in fact very much state-funded and highly biased in favor of anti-Assad forces, yet still gets cited as an independent source by western mass media outlets in a way that just so happens to help make the case for western interventionism in Syria.

"Citing the Syrian Network for Human Rights as an independent and credible source is the journalistic equivalent of sourcing statistics on head trauma to a research front created by the National Football League, or turning to tobacco industry lobbyists for information on the connection between smoking and lung cancer. And yet this has been standard practice among correspondents covering the Syrian conflict," Blumenthal writes. "Indeed, Western press has engaged for years in an insidious sleight of hand, basing reams of shock journalism around claims by a single, highly suspect source that is deeply embedded within the Syrian opposition - and hoped that no one would notice."

I've taken to calling such things "narrative management operations" lately, because that's a much clearer illustration of their function than simply labeling them propaganda constructs and psyops (though those labels are certainly accurate as well). Countless operations have been set up both inside and outside of Syria to control the narrative about what's happening there, and now if a casual observer decides to find out more about the Syrian conflict they'll almost certainly be consuming information that has been filtered through narrative management ops that have been funded by governments within the US-centralized power alliance.

It's like trying to figure out what's going on at the other end of a large room that's been filled with smoke and mirrors.

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump described the Mideast peace plan as a "deal of the century". The plan is supposed to end the decades-long conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

The US presidential administration may postpone the publication of the Mideast peace plan to November 2019, US special envoy to the Middle East Jason Greenblatt said during an interview with The Jerusalem Post on Sunday.

Mr Greenblatt added that the US peace team could have published the plan this summer, but changed its plans after Israel set the date for new elections in September, the newspaper says.

It's been known for some time that the US Government based its conclusion that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC) on a report by cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike, which the DNC paid over a million dollars to conduct forensic analysis and other work on servers they refused to hand over to the FBI.

CrowdStrike's report made its way into a joint FBI/DHS report on an Russia's "Grizzly Steppe", which concluded Russia hacked the DNC's servers. At the time, Crowdstrike's claim drew much scrutiny from cybersecurity experts according to former Breitbart reporter Lee Stranahan.

Now, thanks to a new court filing by longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone requesting the full Crowdstrike analysis, we find out that the US government was given a redacted version of the report marked "Draft," as reported by the Conservative Treehouse.

What makes the whole thing even more hokey is a footnote admitting that "counsel for the DNC and DCCC informed the government that they are the last version of the report produced."

'This is something that happens in authoritarian regimes, not democracies'

United States officials say they are outraged by a government-funded troll campaign that has targeted American citizens critical of the administration's hardline Iran policy and accused critics of being loyal to the Tehran regime.

State Department officials admitted to Congressional staff in a closed-door meeting on Monday that a project they had funded to counter Iranian propaganda had gone off the rails. Critics in Washington have gone further, saying that the programme resembled the type of troll farms used by autocratic regimes abroad.