Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has warned Iraq about the "detrimental" effects of having U.S. forces on its territory and urged its neighbor to get the troops to leave as soon as possible.

In a series of tweets after meeting with visiting Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi in Tehran on April 6, the Iranian leader questioned the motives of the United States, saying it opposes Iraq's "current democratic setting."

"U.S. military presence in Iraq is detrimental to countries and nations of the region. You should take actions to make the U.S. withdraw its troops from Iraq because wherever they have had enduring presence, forcing them out has become problematic," he said in the first of five tweets.

"The U.S. pursues goals beyond simply maintaining military presence in Iraq. They seek enduring presence and interests as well as forming a government like the military states that existed during the early years of occupying Iraq," he added.

The Iraqi prime minister is on a two-day visit to neighboring Iran as the countries seek to expand commercial ties.

North Korea lambasted its southern neighbor as it deployed US-made F-35 fighters amid the ongoing escalation of tensions between the two nations that followed the failed summit between the North Korean and US leaders.

Pyongyang decried the deployment as an "unfriendly act" and warned that this step only "exacerbates tensions" while being "a direct challenge to the peace efforts." A piece published on the North Korean Uriminzokkiri news portal also called on Seoul to think about the potentially "catastrophic consequences" the deployment of the new jets could cause.

On the hot summer morning of Aug. 2, 1980 a massive explosion ripped apart the main waiting room of the Bologna railway station. Eighty-five people were killed and hundreds more injured. Though at first blamed on Italy's legendary urban guerrillas, The Red Brigades, it soon emerged that the attack had, in fact, originated from within the 'deep state' of the Italian government itself.

The full nature of this secret parallel state would only come to light a decade later when the Italian premier, Giulio Andreotti, under questioning from a special commission of inquiry, revealed the existence of arms caches stashed all around the country and which were at the disposal of an organization which later came to be identified as 'Gladio'.

The members of this group turned out to include not only hundreds of far-right figures in the intelligence, military, government, media, Church and corporate sectors, but a motley assortment of unreconstructed WW2 fascists, psychopaths and criminal underworld types to boot. And despite Andreotti's attempts to airbrush the group as 'patriots' it appeared evident to much of the rest of the Italian polity that these seemed rather more like pretty bad folk indeed. Little did they know. Follow-up research by the likes of Daniele Ganser, Claudio Celani, Jurgen Roth and Henrik Kruger traced connections to similar groups spread throughout Europe of which all were found to be deep state terrorist organizations, and all of which were found, ultimately, to be subservient unto the highest levels of the CIA and NATO command structures.

The moniker 'Gladio' (after the two-edged sword used in classical Rome) was eventually broadened to include a bewildering host of related deep state terrorist structures including: 'P2' In Italy, 'P26' in Switzerland, 'Sveaborg' in Sweden, 'Counter-Guerrilla' in Turkey and 'Sheepskin' in Greece. This (hardly definitive) European list was then found to have connections not only to virtually every US sponsored secret state terrorist organization the world over (including the likes of Operation Condor in Latin America), but also to many of the global drug cartels that provided the secretive wealth needed to fund and otherwise lubricate the whole rotting, corrupt shebang.

If all this sounds sinister enough, it pales in light of the detailed structure of the dazzlingly diabolical Gladio edifice. And it is to those details we now repair vis a vis an overview of the remarkable, if otherwise unheralded, 2015 work by journalist Paul L. Williams entitled, 'Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between the Vatican, the CIA and the Mafia'. Though there are other books on the subject worthy of honourable mention (including Daniele Ganser's seminal tome, 'NATO's Secret Armies', and Richard Cottrell's recent and stylishly written, 'Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe'), it is to Williams that I believe we owe a particular debt of gratitude in having provided a more or less fully integrated portrait of the global machinations of Operation Gladio.

Before embarking on our grim, if yet fascinating, journey it is worth first noting that whilst 'Gladio' was officially acknowledged and condemned by the European Parliament (in Nov., 1990; Washington and NATO having ever after refused 'comment' on the matter), and its multifarious organs and factions ordered dismantled, it is hardly likely that the latter was ever fully enacted. The historical context of 'Gladio', then, is really the quintessential backdrop to understanding the trademark false flag events of the modern era.

Washington did not play an insignificant role in turning Libya from a rather stable nation into a chaotic free-for-all battle zone. And now the Pentagon says it is too dangerous for American troops to stay on the ground.

The US Africa Command announced Sunday that it was pulling out a small contingent, which was deployed in Libya a few years ago to assist airstrikes against forces loyal to the terrorist group Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS). The move came in response to the latest escalation of violence in the country.

"Due to increased unrest in Libya, a contingent of US forces supporting US Africa Command temporarily relocated in response to security conditions on the ground," AFRICOM said in a statement.

"We will continue to monitor conditions on the ground and assess the feasibility for renewed US military presence, as appropriate," said Nate Herring, an AFRICOM spokesman.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Israel's Channel 12 News on Saturday evening that he will start extending Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank if re-elected prime minister in the election on April 9. It remains unclear at this point whether Netanyahu was referring to all of the West Bank, or only parts of it.

After boasting that he was responsible for U.S. President Donald Trump's declaration recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, Netanyahu told the program Meet the Press:

"Will we move ahead to the next stage? Yes. I will extend sovereignty but I don't distinguish between the settlement blocs and the isolated ones, because each settlement is Israeli and I will not hand it over to Palestinian sovereignty."

"I will not divide Jerusalem, I will not evacuate any community and I will make sure we control the territory west of Jordan," Netanyahu told the show's host, Rina Matzliah.

Due to recent claims made by WikiLeaks on Twitter that Julian Assange will be forcibly removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London in a matter of "hours or days," MintPress News has brings you this editorial first published last June by journalist Whitney Webb in order to again highlight the dangerous precedent for journalism, free speech and much more the end of Assange's asylum - and his likely extradition to the United States - would set.

Today marks the sixth anniversary of Julian Assange's ascent to the position of the world's most well-known political refugee after daring to be the public face of the ground-breaking transparency organization WikiLeaks. Arbitrarily detained in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for more than half a decade, Assange's precarious situation - a product of the U.S. and U.K. governments' efforts to destroy and silence him forever - threatens to devolve into tragedy.

If Assange's asylum is suspended or he is extradited to the United States, however, it will be much more than a personal tragedy for Assange. It will also be a tragedy for the public's "right to know" and the free flow of information - the first major loss to an empire's battle to quash dissent and silence those who seek to use information to liberate rather than deceive.

Assange's case means much more than the severe mistreatment - torture, as some have said - of a single man whose commitment to bringing the dark deeds of government crimes to light has forced him to sacrifice seeing the outside world - even his own children - for the better part of a decade. Though his mistreatment has no place in any civilized "democracy," the outcome of Assange's case - if his extradition to the United States does come to pass - will have a powerful impact for journalism as a whole. Indeed, if the U.S.-led campaign to extradite and silence Assange is successful, it will invariably become the blueprint used by powerful governments like the U.S. to silence independent journalists the world over, and bludgeon them into submission.

Word to the Wise: Beware the Green New Deal!

Beware Agenda 21 and its Green New Deal!

Seemingly overnight, the Green New Deal has arrived. Given the sorry state of our environment, what possible objections could there be? In this case, plenty - and they all trace back to the Green New Deal's deeply complex and surreptitious ties to UN Agenda 21.

Those who claim that Agenda 21 amounts to little more than a right-wing rant or is somehow anti-Semitic are at best seriously misinformed. Those who buy into the carefully crafted jargon of Sustainable Development, Smart Growth, Redevelopment and the Green New Deal are similarly misinformed and need to know that the environmental movement has in fact been highjacked by the Agenda 21 plan.

First, Some Background

Journalist Thomas L. Friedman is sometimes credited with being the original source for the term "Green New Deal" because in two 2007 articles, in the New York Times and The New York Times Magazine, Friedman connected FDR's "New Deal" to a new "green" economy, suggesting that this might provide an economic stimulus program that could address economic inequality and climate change at the same time. Almost prophetically, Friedman also argued in earlier writings that an "iron fist inside a velvet glove" would be needed to maintain the coming new world order.

Cohen turns on Trump

Saying he recently gained access to a hard drive containing 14 millions files that could have "significant value" to congressional investigators, attorneys for Michael Cohen urged authorities to reduce or at least delay his 3-year prison sentence.

In a letter to Congress Thursday, Cohen's lawyers said their client has cooperated with both federal investigators and lawmakers. They wrote he would have a difficult time gathering the documents and participating in the interviews investigators have requested before he is set to start his prison sentence next month. They said the president's former attorney needs to be "readily accessible and immediately available" for congressional investigators because he recently was able to access the hard drive with "important documents."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hinted on Friday that he may annex Area C of the occupied West Bank, which remained under full Israeli military control following the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993 when the West Bank was broken down into Areas A (the cities under Palestinian control), B (the villages administered by the Palestinians but security in Israel's hands), and C (totally under Israeli control).

When asked by the right-wing Hebrew daily, Israel Hayoum, which advocates his political line, if he will stop short of annexing Area C with its Palestinian dwellers, Netanyahu said in the interview conducted few days before the Israeli national elections, "I promise that you will be surprised. I cannot talk about the plan, but (US President Donald) Trump is a big friend and I doubt there will ever be any bigger friend than him."

Even Joe Biden's wife found her husband's tendency to be overly physical to be strange and off-putting when they first met.

According to an excerpt from the former second lady's upcoming autobiography published in the Daily Mail, when the couple first met, "He was always holding my hand, putting his arm around me, brushing the hair from my face." She added that Joe and his "handsy" family made her feel "strange and uncomfortable" at first. As an admitted introvert, she "sometimes found all that affection draining,"

But she said she soon came to understand that it was the death of Biden's first wife Neilia and their baby daughter Naomi that made Biden and his family realize "how precious every second could be," which was displayed by "constantly touching" and "being connected to each other."