The Trump administration previously promised to present the Mideast peace plan, dubbed the Deal of the Century, after the Israeli election, slated for 9 April.

US President Donald Trump is likely to reveal his Mideast peace plan on 15 May, the 71st anniversary of Nakba Day, or Israeli Independence Day, the Emirati news website Al-Khaleej Online reported on Wednesday, according to the Middle East Monitor.

The website cited unnamed sources as saying that the US administration had informed senior Saudi, Emirati, Egyptian, and Jordanian officials about the date of the announcement.

The long-delayed "Deal of the Century" has reportedly already been completed, with Washington having allegedly obtained financing from Arab and other nations to ensure its implementation.

If you want to delve into the paranormal, here's a reason for you to enlist in the Russian Army - an MoD magazine says some troops are taught to crack safes, evade ambushes and burn computer chips using... telepathic powers.

What is the Russian Army's best-nurtured superpower? Don't even think of Spetsnaz or nuclear subs, or EMP weapons, because Armeisky Sbornik ('Army Digest' in English) has got something bigger to tell. The magazine, run by the Defense Ministry, claims the military is very much into parapsychology, which studies strange things like telepathy, precognition, near-death experiences or reincarnation.

Back in the late 1980s, the Soviet military began developing what the offbeat piece - entitled 'A super-soldier for future wars' - calls 'metacontact,' in other words, a kind of telepathic power that can make a foot soldier into a superhero.

Such a warrior, it insists, is able to use his brain power "to burn chips in generators, eavesdrop on conversations or disrupt telecommunications, including television and radio waves." More than that, believe it or not, the military have been experimenting with miscellaneous linguistic skills. A telepath had reportedly managed to read a file locked in a safe that was "written in a language he didn't speak."

Executives at Facebook, YouTube and 4Chan could face jail time under new "world-first" laws designed to stop the sharing of violent videos and images on social networks.

The legislation, developed in the wake of the Christchurch mosque shooting and passed in the Australian parliament on Thursday local time, targets social networks with hefty fines and even jail terms for company executives if they fail to take down "abhorrent violent material" shared on their platforms.

The laws are unique in that they target social networks and internet service providers, rather than the original users uploading violent material, and set out individual liability for material shared on an entire platform.

Israel is planning to settle some 250,000 settlers in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights over the next 30 years, the Israeli Broadcasting Authority (IBA) revealed yesterday.

According to Anadolu, the report comes one week after US President Donald Trump signed a presidential decree recognising the Golan Heights as "Israeli territory".

US President Donald Trump is desperate to reduce his country's trade deficit with China, but according to the International Monetary Fund, the punitive tariffs he has launched on Beijing will not work.

In a new report released on Wednesday, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said that countries looking to reset trade imbalances should address their own macroeconomic issues instead of launching barriers to trade.

"Attempts to target one bilateral trade balance through tariffs or other distortions is likely to be met with offsetting changes in the trade balances with other partners," the IMF report said.

In what could be viewed as a thinly-veiled challenge to Trump's protectionist policies, the Washington institution's World Economic Outlook report concluded the tariffs could make things worse.

Just hours after former Vice President Joe Biden appeared on video to promise he'd be "more mindful" about others' personal space, three more women have gone public claiming he touched them inappropriately -- and all three said Biden's video didn't go far enough.

In an article published late Wednesday in The Washington Post, Vail Kohnert-Yount charged that when she was an intern in the White House in 2013, Biden approached her to introduce herself.

"He then put his hand on the back of my head and pressed his forehead to my forehead while he talked to me," Kohnert-Yount told The Post. "I was so shocked that it was hard to focus on what he was saying. I remember he told me I was a 'pretty girl.'"

Although Kohnert-Yount said she did not consider Biden's behavior to be "sexual assault or harassment," she added that "it was the kind of inappropriate behavior that makes many women feel uncomfortable and unequal in the workplace."

A non-profit partially funded by controversial billionaire activist George Soros paid firms tied to Fusion GPS and dossier author Christopher Steele over US$3.8 million in 2017 to provide research and analysis to "government entities", IRS filings have revealed.

The payments - made by The Democracy Integrity Project (TDIP) - are more than three times the funding Fusion GPS and Steele received from by the DNC and Hillary Clinton's campaign during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Perkins Coie, the law firm that represented the DNC and Clinton campaign, paid US$1 million to Fusion GPS in 2016 to investigate Trump - Fusion GPS in turn paid Steele, a former MI6 operative, almost US$170,000 for the project that would eventually produce the infamous 'Trump-Russia' dossier.

The report, alleging a long-running and "well-coordinated conspiracy" between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, is now the subject of intense criticism and scrutiny following the conclusion of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's 22-month-long probe into the allegations, which found no evidence of collusion.

Maduro's stay in power has Washington as well as various regional neighbor countries worried about the situation. It seems that Venezuela's neighbors followed a false promise to get rid off the Venezuelan President rather quickly. According to the report, allies of the U.S. are disappointed with the result and are now questioning their decision to recognize Juan Guaido as interim president.

A military invasion seems to be the only method available to accomplish their goal, and such a scenario doesn't sit all too well with countries like Colombia and Brazil, according to the report.

The Venezuelan president said that the authorities continue working for the protection and stabilization of electricity and potable water services.

The president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, denounced on Monday that "an electrical power coup is in full swing", which purpose is to plunge the country into destabilization by taking the electricity and water services from the population.

"When we already had the country connected and we were going to proceed with a cargo management plan, there was a coup via the electromagnetic route to the transmission lines," the president said after explaining the latest attacks on the National Electric System (SEN).

The Venezuelan president said that the experts of the electricity company Corpoelec, the water minister and the armed forces continue to work for the progressive recovery of electricity and drinking water.

Fareed Zakaria puts some of the worst habits of foreign policy punditry on display in these comments on Trump and Venezuela. It comes from a video, so I'm transcribing the full text here:

President Trump faces a crucial test of his foreign policy and his resolve over Venezuela. His administration has made absolutely clear that the U.S. no longer considers Nicolas Maduro to be president, a far stronger declaration than the "red line" that Barack Obama drew around Syria's Assad. So far, Trump's pressure has not worked. Maduro has dug in and the Venezuelan military has not abandoned its support for him. Now Venezuela is a complicated, divided country, and Maduro, as the heir to Hugo Chavez, does have some support in poor and rural areas. But far more significant in bolstering the regime in Caracas has been Russia's open and substantial support.

Moscow now admits that it has sent military personnel to Venezuela. Two Russian military planes arrived in the country last weekend carrying about 100 troops. This is just the latest in a series of moves by Moscow to shore up Maduro. Over the last few years, Russia has provided wheat, arms, credit, and cash to the flailing Caracas government. Estimates of Russia's total investment in Venezuela vary from 20-25 billion dollars. The Venezuelan gambit appears to be personally significant for Russia's President Vladimir Putin. In recent years, as the Venezuelan economy has tanked and political instability has grown, even most Russian companies have abandoned the country, viewing it as too risky. But as Vladimir Rouvinski writes in a Wilson Center Report, Russian state-controlled oil giant Rosneft, which has close ties to Putin, has persisted and even ramped up its support for Maduro.

In other words, Putin is all in with his support for Maduro. He is doing this in part to prop up an old ally and because it adds to Russia's clout in global oil markets, but above all because it furthers Putin's central foreign policy objective: the formation of a global anti-American coalition of countries that can frustrate Washington's purposes and usher in a more multipolar world. Putin's efforts seem designed to taunt the United States, which announced the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, warning foreign powers to stay out of the Western Hemisphere. The big question for Washington is: will it allow Moscow to make a mockery of another American "red line"? The U.S. and Russia have taken opposing, incompatible stands on this issue, and as with Syria there is a danger that, if Washington does not back its words with deeds, a year from now we will be watching the consolidation of the Maduro regime supported by Russian arms and money. The administration has been tough on Russian involvement in Venezuela. Trump himself has even declared that "Russia has to get out," but that is an unusual sentiment from Trump, who has almost never criticized Vladimir Putin and often sided with Russia on matters big and small. As former ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul has written, Trump has a remarkably consistent pattern of supporting Putin's foreign policy goals. Trump has threatened to withdraw from NATO and has announced the removal of American troops from Syria. He has publicly disagreed with his own intelligence community's conclusion that Moscow meddled with the 2016 election. Now I have never alleged collusion or conspiracy between Russia and Trump, writing merely that we should wait to see what evidence Robert Mueller presented. But the real puzzle remains: why has Trump been unwilling to confront Putin in any way on any issue? And will Venezuela finally be the moment when Trump ends his appeasement?