One year out from the influential Iowa Caucus, a new poll found that Democrats want their 2020 candidate to run on a more left-wing platform while also reaching across the aisle to Republicans. Who, if anyone, fits the bill?

For both parties, the Iowa Caucuses mark the beginning of primary season, and are a chance for candidates to establish an early lead. Rather than predicting who will go on to secure their party's nomination, the caucuses are a better indicator of who won't. Almost every candidate who polls badly in Iowa pulls out of the race within days.

The Iowa Caucus is still a year away, but a new poll by Emerson College gives some idea what Democratic voters will look for in their 2020 candidate.

Although seemingly a forgotten word in the age of Trump and the #Resistance, 'bipartisanship' is still key. A whopping 86 percent of likely Democratic Caucus-goers want a candidate who will work with Republican adversaries once in power, and compromise to get things done.

A decision by the United States to militarily intervene in Venezuela's political crisis will spell disaster for the entire region, causing regional crises similar to those going on in the Middle East today, a Latin American expert has warned.

Dennis Small, a Virginia-based editor of Executive Intelligence Review, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Sunday, after US President Donald Trump said military action against Caracas and in support of the Venezuelan opposition was "an option."

Tens of thousands of Venezuelans have thronged the streets of Venezuela, holding rallies in support and against President Nicolas Maduro, who began his second six-year term in office last month.

The rich philosophe is trying to save the continent from Euroskeptics. But his scholarship is sloppy and his politics inconsistent.

The French thinker Bernard-Henri Lévy has emerged as the poster boy for the defense of "Europe" against the advance of the nationalist-populist parties so dreaded by the establishment. Yet Lévy's involvement is more likely than not to turn out as a boon to the nationalists. That's because, in his long media-saturating career as a Parisian public philosophe, Lévy has been an important shaper of the attitudes that have brought France to its current unhappiness.

A wiser political strategy for the neoliberal Merkelist and Macronist parties would be to downplay their ideological distinctions and present their candidates, however disingenuously, as unexceptional center-left and center-right patriots. Macron has been attempting this, with some success, in his own battle against the gilet jaunes. He now appears on TV with a French national flag prominently at his side, and seeks to woo audiences with flattering patriotic references to France's "uniqueness."

But here comes Lévy, organizing a public letter signed by 30 writers and intellectuals throwing down the ideological gauntlet in the coming elections. "The idea of Europe is in peril," Lévy and his co-signers intone. It is being attacked by "false prophets drunk on resentment and delirious at their opportunity to seize the limelight." The European Parliament elections in May, say Lévy and his signatories, "promise to be the most calamitous we have known." He summons Europeans to "a new battle for civilization." Urgently they "sound the alarm" against "these arsonists of soul and spirit who want to make a bonfire of our freedoms." And Lévy isn't stopping at a mere public letter. He promises a tour of two dozen European cities beginning in March. At 70, he bids to become the continent-wide face of resistance to the Euroskeptic parties.

The Qatar Fund for Development explained that the grant to the White Helmets is earmarked for the purchase of seven fire engines and the training of volunteers in Syria, as well as road repairs.

The Qatar Fund for Development (QFFD) has provided a two-million dollar grant to the controversial White Helmets group, in line with directives issued by Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the QFFD's press service told Sputnik.

The agreement on allocating the grant "in support to the Syrian people" was signed by the fund's deputy director-general, Misfer Hamad Al-Shahwani, and the head of the White Helmets, Raed Al Saleh.

Donald Trump will be responsible for a bloodbath that would mirror the war in Vietnam if he gets militarily involved in Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro has warned, describing the potential conflict as a "David against Goliath" scenario.

In an interview with Spanish journalist Jordi Évole, Venezuela's president cited the Bible and past US military debacles in an attempt to dissuade Washington from taking military action against Caracas.

"Stop. Stop, Trump! Hold it right there! You are making mistakes that will leave your hands covered in blood and you will leave the presidency stained with blood," Maduro said. He cautioned that a potential war could mean a new "Vietnam" for Washington.

A Labour MP who heads the group in charge of the UK's arms control policy has come under fire after suggesting NGO statistics on civilian deaths caused by the Saudi-led coalition bombing of Yemen are exaggerated.

The comments come after a damning report by NGO Control Arms UK last week cast light on how the UK's arms export policy has fueled human rights abuses in countries like Yemen.

Graham Jones, who oversees the Commons Committees on Arms Export Controls (CAEC), claimed that "a constant stream of stories" provided by British NGOs about coalition airstrikes in Yemen had turned out to be a "gross exaggeration."

While Yellow Vest protests continue against Macron's reforms, former IMF head Carlo Cottarelli believes the new Italian government represents a populist anti-austerity sentiment, moving from the streets into the EU parliament.

In an interview with RT's Sophie Shevardnadze, Cottarelli suggested that the Yellow Vests' principles have now found expression on a parliamentary level in Italy. Italy's new populist government promises sharp increases in public spending and offers harsh criticism of current EU leadership and French President Emmanuel Macron in particular.

"The yellow jackets are already in power in Italy, so I don't think there are going to be any demonstrations," he said noting that the Italian government sees Macron's weakness as their strength.

Just some reflections that have been coming to mind since my participation in the Gilet Jaune march (Acte XII) for those afflicted by state-sanctioned violence since protests began on November 17th 2018.

What I witnessed on Saturday at the end of a peaceful and unified GJ march through the streets of Paris where people came out onto their balconies to wave French flags and yellow balloons as we passed - has shown me the reflection of evil that was capable of financing and promoting the mass-murdering extremist and terrorist groups that have dismembered Syrian bodies and shed Syrian blood on Syrian soil.

That reflection is in the government of Macron and Hollande before him who welcomed the Al Qaeda #WhiteHelmets into the Champs Elysee and the Assemblee Nationale before Macron mutilated, gassed and trampled his own people in the Champs Elysee and across France with the same spit-in-your-face disregard for human life as their terrorist counterparts in Syria.

If every home on a street, in a neighborhood, or in a town had a Ring surveillance system, the individual cameras, taken together, could construct an extremely intimate picture of daily public life. By integrating facial recognition and contracting with local and federal law enforcement agencies, Amazon supercharges the potential for its massive network of surveillant consumers to comprehensively track the movements of individuals over time, even when the individual has not broken any law. Fully realized, these technologies set the stage for consumer generated mass surveillance.

Amazon's Ring surveillance system dominates the growing video doorbell market. Ring, acquired by Amazon last April, is a system of home surveillance doorbell cameras which operate on an integrated social media platform, Neighbors. Neighbors allows users to share camera footage with other users and law enforcement agencies, as well as report safety issues, strangers, or suspicious activities. The platform aggregates user-generated reports and video data into a local activity maps and watchlists. Similar community platforms where neighbors can report suspicious persons or activity, such as NextDoor, are notorious for racial bias and profiling. This problem will surely be made worse by Amazon's desire to automatically classify persons as "suspicious" through sentiment analysis and other biometric data collection.

Who is this man, and why does the CIA fear him? Because they thought he was one of theirs, and it turns out he's quite the opposite. And now he's spilling the beans on them. Read on:

Raúl Capote is a Cuban. But not just any Cuban. In his youth, he was caught up by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). They offered him an infinite amount of money to conspire in Cuba. But then something unexpected for the US happened. Capote, in reality, was working for Cuban national security. From then on, he served as a double agent. Learn his story, by way of an exclusive interview with Chávez Vive, which he gave in Havana:

Q. What was the process by which you were caught up?

It started with a process of many years, several years of preparation and capture. I was leader of a Cuban student movement which, at that time, gave rise to an organization, the Saiz Brothers Cultural Association, a group of young creators, painters, writers, artists. I worked in a city in southern-central Cuba, Cienfuegos, which had characteristics of great interest to the enemy, because it was a city in which an important industrial pole was being built at the time. They were building an electrical centre, the only one in Cuba, and there were a lot of young people working on it. For that reason, it was also a city that had a lot of young engineers graduated in the Soviet Union. We're talking of the last years of the 1980s, when there was that process called Perestroika. And many Cuban engineers, who arrived in Cuba at that time, graduated from there, were considered people who had arrived with that idea of Perestroika. For that reason, it was an interesting territory, where there were a lot of young people. And the fact that I was a youth leader of a cultural organization, which dealt with an important sector of the engineers who were interested in the arts, became of interest to the North Americans, and they began to frequent the meetings we attended. They never identified themselves as enemies, or as officials of the CIA.