Whoever wins the bitter trade row between the two biggest world economies, the US or China, the consequences are set to spread far beyond... erasing up to $600 billion off global GDP, according to a Bloomberg forecast.

Trade representatives from Washington and Beijing had been soothing the markets as they indicated that they were on the verge of a deal, before the trade war reignited two weeks ago. After the two sides introduced tit-for-tat tariff hikes, the trade conflict then turned into a technological war as the Trump administration blacklisted Chinese telecom giant Huawei and has been pressing its overseas allies to ditch the company's 5G equipment.

The United States is seriously considering suspending training for Turkish pilots on advanced F-35 fighter jets as Ankara moves ahead with plans to purchase a Russian missile defense system despite objections from Washington, sources told Reuters on Tuesday.

The two NATO allies have argued for months over Turkey's order for the Russian S-400 defenses, which Washington says are incompatible with the Western alliance's defense network and would pose a threat to American F-35 stealth fighters which Turkey also plans to buy.

The two sources, who are familiar with Turkey's role in the F-35 program and who spoke on condition of anonymity, said a final decision had not yet been made.

The deliberation follows signs that Turkey is moving ahead with the S-400 purchase. Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said on May 22 that Turkish military personnel were receiving training in Russia to use the S-400, and said Russian personnel may come to Turkey.

The Israeli secret service, Mossad, spied on Jörg Haider, the right-wing Austrian populist, The London Times newspaper reported Thursday.

Mossad used Peter Sichrovsky, one of Haidar's closest aides, to gather information on his contacts with Arab dictators. Sichrovsky said he had been a Mossad informant for five years until retiring from politics in 2002.

"I wanted to help Israel and certainly did not do anything wrong," said Sichrovsky, who was secretary-general of Haider's Freedom Party and a member of the European Parliament.

The Austrian state prosecutor said Wednesday he would open an investigation to determine whether Sichrovsky should be prosecuted. Spying for a foreign power carries in Austria a jail sentence of up to three years.

The revelations, in the news weekly Profil, stunned the Austrian political class. The Jewish community had regarded Sichrovsky as a traitor, while anti-Semitic Freedom Party activists made no secret of their distrust.

The Freedom Party became a member of Austria's governing coalition in 1999, prompting a diplomatic boycott by the European Union. Haider had publicly praised the SS and Hitler's employment policies. Israel withdrew its ambassador.

It is astonishing how often one still hears well-informed, otherwise reasonable people say about Julian Assange: "But he ran away from Swedish rape charges by hiding in Ecuador's embassy in London."

That short sentence includes at least three factual errors. In fact, to repeat it, as so many people do, you would need to have been hiding under a rock for the past decade - or, amounting to much the same thing, been relying on the corporate media for your information about Assange, including from supposedly liberal outlets such as the Guardian and the BBC.

At the weekend, a Guardian editorial - the paper's official voice and probably the segment most scrutinised by senior staff - made just such a false claim:

Then there is the rape charge that Mr Assange faced in Sweden and which led him to seek refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in the first place.

The fact that the Guardian, supposedly the British media's chief defender of liberal values, can make this error-strewn statement after nearly a decade of Assange-related coverage is simply astounding. And that it can make such a statement days after the US finally admitted that it wants to lock up Assange for 175 years on bogus "espionage" charges - a hand anyone who wasn't being wilfully blind always knew the US was preparing to play - is still more shocking.

Assange faces no charges in Sweden yet, let alone "rape charges". As former UK ambassador Craig Murray recently explained, the Guardian has been misleading readers by falsely claiming that an attempt by a Swedish prosecutor to extradite Assange - even though the move has not received the Swedish judiciary's approval - is the same as his arrest on rape charges. It isn't.

Also, Assange did not seek sanctuary in the embassay to evade the Swedish investigation. No state in the world gives a non-citizen political asylum to avoid a rape trial. The asylum was granted on political grounds. Ecuador rightly accepted Assange's concerns that the US would seek his extradition and lock him out of sight for the rest of his life.

Assange, of course, has been proven - yet again - decisively right by recent developments.

A US governor has blamed Palestinians for Israel's ongoing occupation of their land, just weeks before the United States plans to unveil the economic portion of its "deal of the century" peace plan.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a longtime supporter of Israel and a member of Donald Trump's Republican Party, made his comments during a trade delegation visit to Israel this week.

"If you look at this whole conflict, to me, the biggest problem has been that Palestinian Arabs have not recognised Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state," DeSantis said during a news briefing at the Hilton Tel Aviv on Monday morning.

"That kind of denialism poisons really everything," he continued.


DeSantis's visit to Israel comes as Washington intends to unveil the economic portion of the "deal of the century" to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict next month in Bahrain.

"Russiagate, like Count Dracula, will never end because new political blood will be fed to this vampire . . . The Russiagate fable - fraud - has become a kind of theocratic cult, and it has millions and millions and millions of self-interested and unwitting followers."

That was Stephen F. Cohen's comment after Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded that there was no evidence to convict President Donald Trump or any of his campaign staff of colluding with Russia to steal the 2016 presidential election. He was speaking to nationally syndicated radio host John Batchelor in one of their broadcasts on Radio WABC-AM, New York City, which have been archived on the website of The Nation for the past five years.

Now, a month later, Democratic elites are still roaming the streets of Washington and the Halls of Congress in search of fresh blood. On May 16, The Washington Post reported that House Democrats had begun a marathon public reading of the "Mueller Report" for citizens who don't have time to read the whole thing but might listen to the audio. There's no there there, but they won't let go. Are they serious? Or just mortified, like most vampires, by the light of day? Whichever, they're likely to lose again in 2020, because poll after poll says that Americans don't care; Russia-gate is nowhere near the top of their list of concerns.

Cohen is Russian studies professor emeritus at Princeton and NYU. His latest book, "War with Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate," is a series of essays published in The Nation and text elaborations of the radio broadcasts.

Cohen says that Russia-gate has deeply damaged at least four U.S. institutions: the electoral system; the presidency; the "intelligence community;" and the media, meaning most of all the influential "legacy" media; The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the major television and cable news networks. Whichever side of the partisan divide they're on, Americans know they've been lied to by one or more of them. Will they find reason to widely trust any of these institutions again? Will any Washington officials and their staffers, and their allied power brokers and intelligence agents, trust any others from here on?

Beijing is gearing up to use its dominance of rare earths to hit back in its deepening trade war with Washington.

A flurry of Chinese media reports on Wednesday, including an editorial in the flagship newspaper of the Communist Party, raised the prospect of Beijing cutting exports of the commodities that are critical in defense, energy, electronics and automobile sectors. The world's biggest producer, China supplies about 80% of U.S. imports of rare earths, which are used in a host of applications from smartphones to electric vehicles and wind turbines.

The threat to weaponize strategic materials ratchets up the tension between the world's two biggest economies before an expected meeting between Presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump at the G-20 meeting next month. It shows how China is weighing its options after the U.S. blacklisted Huawei Technologies Co., cutting off the supply of American components it needs to make its smartphones and networking gear.

"China, as the dominant producer of rare earths, has shown in the past that it can use rare earths as a bargaining chip when it comes to multilateral negotiations," said George Bauk, Chief Executive Officer of Northern Minerals Ltd., which is producing rare earth carbonate from a pilot-scale project in Western Australia.

India must have a permanent seat on the UNSC to ensure proper representation of the country on the international stage, the vice president stated, as New Delhi continues to promulgate the council's reform.

"We must renew our efforts to gain a permanent membership of the UN Security Council by further enhancing support from world nations and building a sustained dialogue in favor of UNSC reforms," Shri M. Venkaiah Naidu said on Tuesday. "India has emerged as the fastest growing economy with global powers acknowledging India's growth story."

At present, there are five permanent members of the Security Council - China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the US - which all have veto powers to cast aside any resolution which could compromise world stability and security. In addition to the victorious powers in World War II, the chamber also has ten seats for non-permanent members that are elected by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) for two-year terms to better represent their geographic regions. These states, however, lack the veto powers awarded to permanent members of the council.

Huawei is understandably reexamining a number of relationships in the wake of a recent U.S. trade ban. While various component and software providers, including Google and ARM, have suspended dealings with the Chinese hardware giant, the latest issue comes from an altogether different source.

The company told Reuters this week that it's reassessing its relationship with FedEx after the delivery company misrouted a handful of packages. Huawei says the packages contained documents, rather than specific technologies covered by the current Trump ban.

"The recent experiences where important commercial documents sent via FedEx were not delivered to their destination, and instead were either diverted to, or were requested to be diverted to, FedEx in the United States, undermines our confidence," a rep for the company said. "We will now have to review our logistics and document delivery support requirements as a direct result of these incidents."

China's telecom giant Huawei has hit back at the U.S. ban by filing a motion on Tuesday to ask the court to declare a law which places bans on the company equipment "unconstitutional."

The 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, enacted last summer, has directly and permanently targeted Huawei "without opportunity for rebuttal or escape," Song Liuping, Huawei's chief legal officer said in a statement issued on Monday.

"The law provides Huawei with no opportunity to rebut the accusations, to present evidence in its defense, or to avail itself of other procedures that impartial adjudicators provide to ensure a fair search for the truth," Liu said. "The ban is a quintessential bill of attainder and a violation of due process."