The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) complained on Friday that it received no reply from Tehran on the extension of a temporary agreement on the recording and collection of data from Iranian nuclear facilities after the deal expired on Thursday, with agency chief Rafael Grossi demanding "an immediate response" from Iran on the issue.

Iran's decision to continue the collection of data on its nuclear facilities for the IAEA under an interim deal reached in February was voluntary, and the nuclear watchdog shouldn't consider this information as something it's automatically entitled to, Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran's ambassador to the IAEA, has indicated.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov has said he plans to meet soon with U.S. Ambassador John Sullivan, who returned to Moscow this week after two months away from the post.

"Next week, I will hold a meeting with Ambassador Sullivan," Ryabkov told TASS on June 26. "Of course, the main issues include normalizing the work of Russian missions in the United States and U.S. missions in Russia."

Ryabkov also said the two sides were already following up on recent agreements to cooperate on cybersecurity issues, with the aim of beginning "full-fledged and all-embracing dialogue."

Earlier this week, Russia and the UK clashed after London dispatched a heavily-armed destroyer, HMS Defender, to disputed waters off Crimea. Moscow considers the region its sovereign territory, and its navy fired warning shots.

Fortunately, the British ship passed through and nobody was hurt. At least not yet. Britain's post-Brexit global strategy, it seems, is both puzzling and worrying, driving potential conflicts not only in the Black Sea, but with its plans to needle China as well.

The Russian and British governments' different stances over who the waters belong to are well-known. Russia maintains that its 2014 absorption of Crimea was legal, while Ukraine and its Western patrons do not. However, this dispute is not the driving factor behind this particular incident, despite what the colorful British Prime Minister and Tory Party leader Boris 'BoJo' Johnson is claiming, complete with mock-Churchillian references to the Russian "bear."

"We owe it to people who have sacrificed so much in this pandemic to be honest when we have let them down," the disgraced MP says.

Matt Hancock has resigned as health secretary after admitting breaking coronavirus rules, Downing Street says.

In his letter of resignation, Mr Hancock said: "The last thing I would want is for my private life to distract attention from the single-minded focus that is leading us out of this crisis.

The Washington Post's glaring conflicts of interest have of late once again been the subject of scrutiny online, thanks to a new article denouncing a supposed attempt to "soak" billionaires in taxes. Written by star columnist Megan McArdle — who previously argued that Walmart's wages are too high, that there is nothing wrong with Google's monopoly, and that the Grenfell Fire was a price worth paying for cheaper buildings — the article claimed that Americans have such class envy that the government would "destroy [billionaires'] fortunes so that the rest of us don't have to look at them." Notably, the Post chose to illustrate it with a picture of its owner, Jeff Bezos, making it seem as if it was directly defending his power and wealth, something they have been accused of on more than one occasion.

There was considerable speculation online as to whether Bezos himself wrote the piece, so blatantly in his interest it was. Unfortunately, this sort of speculation has raged ever since the Amazon CEO bought the newspaper in 2013 for $250 million.

With the news about the health risks involved with the covid vaccine, President Trump spoke out to Newsmax about the freedom from getting the vaccine. Americans have a right NOT to get a vaccine if they choose not to, but the push has been on from the Biden administration to get 70% of Americans vaccinated by July 4th. Members of the administration have even been traveling around the US, giving speeches promoting vaccinations.


Even though there are risks, there are other reasons why people may not want to get a covid vaccine. If someone has had covid and has antibodies, they do not need the vaccine. If a person is young and has no comorbidities, there is a very small chance they will get very sick from covid. The big question to ask is, does the risk outweigh the cost?

In fact, Tucker Carlson recently spoke to Dr. Robert Malone, who helped create the mRNA technology behind the COVID vaccines. Dr. Malone discussed whether people should get a covid vaccine if they aren't at great risk:


BECAUSE THIS INFORMATION IS SO IMPORTANT, THE TRANSCRIPT OF WHAT DR. MALONE SAYS IS BELOW:

Israel has approved 31 zoning plans, each containing a small number of housing units or facilities, in the occupied West Bank, in the first such move since the new coalition government came into office on 13 June.

The move, which was passed on Wednesday, saw 18 of the construction plans receiving final approval in illegal settlements such as Alfei Menashe, Elkana, Havat Sde Bar and Yitzhar. The approval is the first of its kind in six months.

According to Haaretz, chairman of the Joint List alliance of Arab-majority parties, Ayman Odeh, denounced the approval of the construction in the settlements. Odeh said:

"The government has existed for less than two weeks, and already, 31 construction plans have been approved in the settlements. The left is surrendering to the right and setting the diplomatic issue aside, but the right continues to sabotage the chances of peace and to deepen the occupation, repression, and dispossession of millions of Palestinians."

The war in Afghanistan has looked a lot like the war on drugs in Latin America and previous colonial campaigns in Asia, with a rapid militarization of the area and the empowerment of pliant local elites.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a death knell to so many industries in Afghanistan. Charities and aid agencies have even warned that the economic dislocation could spark widespread famine. But one sector is still booming: the illicit opium trade. Last year saw Afghan opium poppy cultivation grow by over a third while counter-narcotics operations dropped off a cliff. The country is said to be the source of over 90% of all the world's illicit opium, from which heroin and other opioids are made. More land is under cultivation for opium in Afghanistan than is used for coca production across all of Latin America, with the creation of the drug said to directly employ around half a million people.

This is a far cry from the 1970s, when poppy production was minimal, and largely for domestic consumption. But this changed in 1979 when the CIA launched Operation Cyclone, the widespread funding of Afghan Mujahideen militias in an attempt to bleed dry the then-recent Soviet invasion. Over the next decade, the CIA worked closely with its Pakistani counterpart, the ISI, to funnel $2 billion worth of arms and assistance to these groups, including the now infamous Osama Bin Laden and other warlords known for such atrocities as throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women.

"From statements by U.S. Ambassador [to Iran] Richard Helms, there was little heroin production in Central Asia by the mid 1970s," Professor Alfred McCoy, author of "The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade," told MintPress. But with the start of the CIA secret war, opium production along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border surged and refineries soon dotted the landscape. Trucks loaded with U.S. taxpayer-funded weapons would travel from Pakistan into its neighbor to the west, returning filled to the brim with opium for the new refineries, their deadly product ending up on streets worldwide. With the influx of Afghan opium in the 1980s — Jeffrey St. Clair, co-author of "Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press," alleges — heroin addiction more than doubled in the United States.

Ivory Hecker, a reporter with the Houston affiliate of Fox News, fired a surprising broadside at the network, accusing it of suppressing reporting that didn't fit the desired narrative, and promising to expose it.

During a live report on Monday, Hecker alleged that "Fox Corp. has been muzzling" her and possibly other reporters "to keep certain information from you, the viewers."

"I am going to be releasing some recordings about what goes on behind the scenes at Fox," she said, pointing to the controversial conservative outfit Project Veritas. The material is supposed to be published by the outlet on Tuesday.

Vandana Shiva is a brilliant mind calling for inhabitants of the Earth to unite against forces that are threatening to destroy the planet, in part via a new wave of colonization in the name of sustainability.

Tech billionaire Bill Gates, now the largest owner of farmland in the U.S.,¹ is at the root of the problem, pushing technology as the only mechanism to save the world, and in so doing denying real solutions. This path is not accidental but carefully orchestrated to amass wealth, power and control, while making all but the elite subservient.

In my interview with Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., she spoke about Gates Ag One,² which is headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, where Monsanto is also headquartered.

"Gates Ag One is one [type of] agriculture for the whole world, organized top down. He's written about it. We have a whole section on it in our new report,³ 'Gates to a Global Empire,'" she said. This includes digital farming, in which farmers are surveilled and mined for their agricultural data, which is then repackaged and sold back to them.