France has no reliable evidence that the chemical agent chlorine was used by the Syrian government forces, and thus cannot yet speak of a 'red line' having been crossed, the French Defense Minister said.

"We have some indications of possible chlorine use [in Syria], but we have no absolute confirmation," Minister Florence Parly told France Inter radio on Friday. "So we, alongside the others, are working on trying to confirm this, as we clearly have to get the facts straight." Parly did not specify who else was engaged in the confirmation effort.

Currently, Paris is not ready for a harsh response alluded to by French President Emmanuel Macron in May 2017, according to the country's defense chief. At that time, Macron said that the use of chemical weapons in Syria is "a red line" for France and would result in "immediate reprisals."

It has become known that the Idlib militant groups have clashed with one another, at the extradition of the body of the fallen pilot Major Filipov, to Russia.

The body of the pilot was passed on to Turkish intelligence by the militants of "Faylak ash-Sham" - "Sham Corps" (Sham is the ancient name of Syria). Part of this large group are taking part in the Turkish special operation "Olive Branch" in the Kurdish enclave of Afrin.

A video has surfaced where militants argue over who gets the body of the pilot - before its evacuation.

The leaders of Jhabat al-Nusra, through their media wing - the Ebaa agency - accused an ash-Sham militant of stealing the body and passing it on to Turkish intelligence. An hour ago, the al-Nusra issued an official statement, which states that the terrorists planned to exchange Roman Filipov for imprisoned militants.

Mankind ended last night.

I know, I know, you probably didn't realize.

But it happened.

A world leader publicly pronounced it dead.

Yes, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau killed off 'mankind' because he finds the word offensive.

I'm not kidding. I wish I were.

Don't worry, everyone - apparently Justin Trudeau was only joking when he said he prefers saying 'peoplekind' instead of 'mankind'.

The Canadian prime minister has backtracked after a video showing him appearing to correct a woman during a question and answer session went viral.

He interrupted a woman named Aimee when she said the word 'mankind', telling her: 'We like to say peoplekind, not necessarily mankind, because it's more inclusive.'

Maybe it was his deadpan delivery, but unfortunately for Mr Trudeau, nobody seemed to pick up on his mad bants.

The so-called Nunes memo prepared for the Republican majority on the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, even if overblown, clearly suggests that there might have been an unwarranted and quite possibly illegal Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) surveillance of a former Trump staffer over his completely legal Russian business ties. Meanwhile, the nine month-long Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigation into Moscow's possible interference in the US election has so far only demonstrated that it was Israel rather than Russia that meddled with the campaign by meeting with Trump associates and seeking favors. Notably missing is any evidence that the Russian government did anything beyond the usual probing that intelligence agencies worldwide do when confronted by important developments in another country that is either a competitor or adversary.

An aspect of the Republican memo that has been scarcely commented upon in the avalanche of news reporting centered on the story is how the mainstream media is continuing to exercise a dangerous obsession with Russia and is insisting that the Russiagate inquiry should continue even more aggressively in spite of the concerns raised by the Republican memo that the entire process has been politicized. There is absolutely nothing in the memo itself that indicates that Moscow actually tried to recruit any Trump associate as an agent or interfere in the US election. The raison d'etre for both the Congressional and Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigations appears to be lacking. It might eventually emerge that Russia did little or even nothing beyond the usual probing and nosing around that intelligence agencies routinely do.

The publication of the Republican House Committee memo and reports of other documents increasingly suggest not only a "Russiagate" without Russia but also something darker: The "collusion" may not have been in the White House or the Kremlin.

Referring to the memo whose preparation was overseen by Republican Congressman Devin Nunes and whose release was authorized by President Trump, and to similar reports likely to come, Cohen, having for years researched Soviet-era archive materials (once highly classified), understands the difficulties involved in summarizing such secret documents, especially when they have been generated by intelligence agencies. They must be put in the larger political context of the time, which can be fully understood only by using other sources as well, including open ones; and they may be contradicted by other classified materials not yet available.

Nonetheless, the "Republican memo," as it has become known while we await its Democratic counterpart, indicates that some kind of operation against presidential candidate and then President Trump, an "investigation," has been under way among top officials of US intelligence agencies for a long time. The memo focuses on questionable methods used by Obama's FBI and Justice Department to obtain a warrant permitting them to surveil Carter Page, a peripheral and short-tenured Trump foreign-policy adviser, and the role played in this by the anti-Trump "dossier" complied by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer whose career specialization was Russia. But the memo's implications are even larger.

US Treasury admits further sectoral sanctions against Russia's sovereign debt would backfire

In a recent article for RussiaFeed I discussed the possible additional sectoral sanctions against Russia which were being discussed in the US, and I said that none of them would do significant long term harm to Russia, but all of them risked doing real harm to the US.

As a self-sufficient continental economy sanctions on Russia almost by definition can have only a limited impact, and one which over time must diminish anyway.

As it happens the most effective sanctions the West could have imposed on Russia, both in terms of their impact on the Russian economy and their limited impact on the economies of the West, were the sectoral sanctions which were imposed in 2014.

Those sanctions did stop for a time the flow of capital from the West into Russia at a time when Russia was facing heavy debt repayments and when the price of its main export products - oil and gas - was collapsing. The result was to deepen the recession caused by the collapse of oil and gas prices whilst further lowering the value of the rouble in a way which intensified the inflation spike.

With oil prices now rising, most short term Russian foreign debt repaid, and with the rouble floating, none of the sanctions discussed in this article look like they can have anything like the impact on Russia that the sanctions imposed in 2014 did.

The fact that the Russian economy successfully - in fact almost effortlessly - adjusted to those sanctions despite the difficult conditions ought to serve as a warning that further sanctions against Russia will not work, and if they are of the sort discussed in this article are counter-productive.

After the terrorist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a rebrand of Jabhat al-Nusra, which is the Syrian al-Qaeda affiliate, claimed responsibility for the dramatic downing of a Russian Su-25 fighter jet over Idlib in northwest Syria on Saturday - the first Russian plane downed in Syria since 2015 - a number of analysts have published articles asking the obvious million dollar question: where did al-Qaeda get the portable anti-aircraft missile system used in the attack?

Once such article in Al Monitor speculates on the following: "The three immediate questions that arose from the attack were how the downing was made possible, how the militants acquired the arms and whether there was a bigger-level player behind the attack."

Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee who has been leading a congressional investigation into President Trump's alleged ties to Russia, had extensive contact last year with a lobbyist for a Russian oligarch who was offering Warner access to former British spy and dossier author Christopher Steele, according to text messages obtained exclusively by Fox News.

"We have so much to discuss u need to be careful but we can help our country," Warner texted the lobbyist, Adam Waldman, on March 22, 2017.

"I'm in," Waldman, whose firm has ties to Hillary Clinton, texted back to Warner.

Steele famously put together the anti-Trump dossier of unverified information that was used by FBI and Justice Department officials in October 2016 to get a warrant to conduct surveillance of former Trump adviser Carter Page. Despite the efforts, Steele has not agreed to an interview with the committee.

We'll bring you Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel's tweetstorm in a moment, but I'll take a stab at answering her question about the media right out of the gate. Three possibilities:

1. The GOP hyped the Nunes memo, which quickly became the center of this whole firestorm -- replete with counter-memos, FBI objections, etc. The press followed the spotlight.
2. As we've been saying, there are so many complex pieces of this larger puzzle, following the plot is difficult. It's not just news consumers wondering, "which memo is this now?" -- it's many of the people trying to cover this drama, too. The document in question here is a second, less redacted, version of a Senate memo that few people have even heard of.
3. The Senate memo, produced by non-bomb-throwers Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham, is substantially more disruptive to the Democrats' narrative than the Nunes document. And the press generally prefers Democratic narratives to Republican ones because most journalists are liberals.