Statement by FBI Director James B. Comey on the Investigation of Secretary Hillary Clinton's Use of a Personal E-Mail System
Washington, D.C. July 05, 2016

Remarks prepared for delivery at press briefing.

Good morning. I'm here to give you an update on the FBI's investigation of Secretary Clinton's use of a personal e-mail system during her time as Secretary of State.

After a tremendous amount of work over the last year, the FBI is completing its investigation and referring the case to the Department of Justice for a prosecutive decision. What I would like to do today is tell you three things: what we did; what we found; and what we are recommending to the Department of Justice.

This will be an unusual statement in at least a couple ways. First, I am going to include more detail about our process than I ordinarily would, because I think the American people deserve those details in a case of intense public interest. Second, I have not coordinated or reviewed this statement in any way with the Department of Justice or any other part of the government. They do not know what I am about to say.

Fewer than 100 Syrian fighters have been trained under a revamped train-and-equip program run by the Pentagon, US media report. The new focus is on training rebel leaders as "spotters" of Islamic State targets for US-led coalition airstrikes, officials say.

The additional 100 Syrian rebel leaders have been trained to fight Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) under a new Pentagon-run train-and-equip program since March, US officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity told reporters on Monday.

The revamped $416-million-worth program does not include training entire rebel units, according to Stars and Stripes. It mostly focuses on training Syrian rebel leaders as local informants and spotting potential targets on the grounds for US and coalition airstrikes."Rather than training 10 people to use a rifle, if you can train a smaller number of people to accurately describe their own position relative to the position of enemy forces, it enables them to better coordinate resupply and describe enemy positions," one official was cited by the newspaper as saying.

After the events in 1979 and the Islamic Revolution, which took place in Iran by overthrowing the Pahlavi dynasty, the new government of Iran was charged with a serious task: maintaining order and preventing a counter-revolution. The survival of the new government was crucial, especially since the previous dynasty was very close to the Western governments and the US. The most reliable mechanism for achieving this was, of course, military control. Regular forces of Iran's army were not enough to ensure the survival of the Islamic Republic - we should keep in mind that much of the regular forces were leftovers of the previous regime and could not be fully trusted. However, revolutionary forces, which include the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Basij militia and the Quds Force, have had an enormous impact on maintaining the Islamic Republic's government, but also, the IRGC gained a significant position in Iranian society and state policy. The IRGC, which was formed in 1979, is a product of the Islamic Revolution and since then, as a military organisation in Iran, it became one of the pillars of the Iranian state. On the 5th of May 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a decree with which the IRGC was formed as a parallel military structure beside the Iranian Army. The IRGC was focused on internal matters rather than on external ones. The Revolutionary Council also stated eight categories of duties for the IRGC:

• Assisting security apparatus in dealing with counter-revolutionary elements
• Fighting armed counter-revolutionaries
• Battling against foreign forces inside the country
• Cooperating with the armed forces of the country in training subordinates in moral, ideological and political matters
• Assisting the government in implementing the Islamic Revolution
• Supporting liberation movements across the world in their fight for justice under the tutelage of the leader of the Islamic Revolution
• Utilising all resources in dire times of catastrophes and calamities in order the help and improve the society of the Islamic Republic of Iran

Putin's meetings with the Chinese leadership in Beijing and Tashkent consolidate the most powerful alliance in the world today.

Though it has received minimal attention in the West, last week Putin completed his 15th visit to China where he held intensive talks with the Chinese leadership led by Chinese President Xi Jinping.

This came directly after Putin met Xi Jinping at the immediately preceding Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Tashkent. According to Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang, whom Putin also met in Beijing, Xi Jinping has met Putin more often than he has met any other foreign leader.

On the Russian side the talks between Putin and the Chinese leadership in Beijing did not involve Putin alone. Putin's meeting with Xi Jinping in Beijing started as a one-to-one meeting with just the two leaders and their interpreters present. It was then expanded to include top officials and ministers of both the Russian and Chinese governments.

Who are you going to believe: us, or your lying eyes? That's the good word from Democratic Party powers that be and their transcribers in the corporate media, in response to the "allegations" by Bernie Sanders supporters that the nomination was stolen by Hillary Clinton.

I used scare quotes around the word "allegations" because the truth is plain to see and undeniable by anyone with a microgram of honesty: Hillary Clinton cheated. If the rules had been followed, Bernie Sanders would be the nominee.

As with all things Clinton, of course, definitions matter. It depends on what the meaning of "cheat" is.

To most people, "cheating" means breaking the rules of a contest. By this standard definition, there's no doubt that the Clinton campaign, its political allies and the Democratic National Committee cheated in favor of Clinton and against Sanders. They broke the law. They disenfranchised voters. They broke party rules. And they violated long-standing customs that are so widely accepted that they are essentially de facto rules of the Democratic Party and the American political system.

In this video the former finance minister of Greece and founder of DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement 2025), Yanis Varoufakis, provides us an insight into why the European constitution does not represent the people of Europe and lacks substance. He also talks about disintegration of the European Union, what forces are driving its demise and how Orwellian language is used to hide this.

• Do we have a constitution that represents the voice of the European people?
• Could the EU disintegrate in the near future?
• What are the observations that are pointing towards a disintegrating European Union?
• Is Orwellianism being employed to deceive the population?

These questions and more are addressed in this video.

This has been an amazing week which saw the first clear sign of the collapse of the EU and Turkish President Erdogan presenting his excuses to Russia for the downing of a Russian SU-24 over Syria 7 month ago. While the latter event was largely eclipsed by the former, it might be the sign of something even more dramatic taking place: the collapse of Turkey.

Does that seem like hyperbole?

Let's look again.

The Presidency of Erdogan has been nothing short of cataclysmic for Turkey which resulted in a perfect storm of crises, each of them very serious:

1) Crisis in Syria: the Turkish policy of support for Daesh to overthrow Assad has failed. Abjectly so. Not only is Assad still in power, but the latest bombing in Turkey seem to indicated that Daesh is turning against Turkey now (assuming the official explanations is true, which it might not be as we will discuss below). The entire Syria policy of Erdogan is now in shambles.

2) Crisis with the EU: the last thing the Brits did before Brexiting was to tell Turkey that it could join the EU in 3000 years. Other EU member states were not as direct, but everybody knows that this is true. Furthermore, the grand Erdogan-Merkel friendship and alliance has completely fizzled out.

The first two days of the past week saw two momentous developments on the diplomatic front take place on the Turkish scene. But Tuesday night then witnessed a heinous terror attack that left the country reeling. The ruling Justice and Development Party (or AKP), led by Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım (aka Hapless) and staunchly supported by the nominally neutral President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (aka the Prez), appeared in shock following a triple suicide attack on the Atatürk Airport in Istanbul . . . but could it be that these seemingly random and unrelated events are somehow interlinked and interconnected?

Last Monday and Tuesday (27-28 June 2016) have constituted a most momentous 48 hours for Turkey. At the very outset of the week, things looked up with the Turkish media (read, the state propaganda apparatus) reporting that Israel had finally decided to make reparations and reinstate cordial relations with Turkey, relations that have been shaky ever since then-PM Erdoğan's "One Minute" performance at Davos (30 January 2009) and the subsequent deadly Mavi Marmara incident (31 May 2010).

Later on during the same day then news emerged that Turkey had, in turn, made overtures towards Russia, in an attempt to patch up things between Ankara and Moscow, between Tayyip Erdoğan and Vladimir Putin. Following these two major developments on the political scene, pundits and the public alike were busy regurgitating the facts when Tuesday night, towards 10 PM, terrorist struck at Istanbul's main communication artery, the Atatürk Airport in Yeşilköy, the nation's biggest and Europe's third largest, in operation since 1924, serving more than 60 million passengers last year.

The Ukrainian Army has received four advanced counterbattery radar systems and 10 countermortar radar systems from the United States military, according to Russian language news accounts.

The systems, used at the battalion level by US troops, are among the most advanced of its type in the world. The systems enables the operator to pinpoint the location of firing artillery and mortars and enable friendly artillery to hit and destroy firing artillery, according to a story posted on the korrespondent.net news website.

Four each AN/PQ-36 Firefinder radar systems and 10 each AN/TPQ-49 radar systems arrived at the Boryspil International Airport on Saturday. According to the report, additional $500 million in direct aid is to be transferred to Ukraine from the United States.

Whatever deal has been struck still leaves Palestine under a horrendous, medieval siege. Israeli historian Ilan Pappe was not far off the mark when he qualified it as "incremental genocide." It's like this was a post-modern normalization of relations with apartheid South Africa.

Pepe Escobar is an independent geopolitical analyst. He writes for RT, Sputnik and TomDispatch, and is a frequent contributor to websites and radio and TV shows ranging from the US to East Asia. He is the former roving correspondent for Asia Times Online, where he wrote the column The Roving Eye from 2000 to 2014. Born in Brazil, he's been a foreign correspondent since 1985, and has lived in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Washington, Bangkok and Hong Kong. Even before 9/11 he specialized in covering the arc from the Middle East to Central and East Asia, with an emphasis on Big Power geopolitics and energy wars. He is the author of "Globalistan" (2007), "Red Zone Blues" (2007), "Obama does Globalistan" (2009) and "Empire of Chaos" (2014), all published by Nimble Books. His latest book is "2030", also by Nimble Books, out in December 2015. He currently lives between Paris and Bangkok. In an exclusive interview with the English section of Khamenei.ir, Mr. Escobar's sheds light on Turkey-Israel relations and the issue of Palestine.

The following is the full text of the interview: