Kosovo's prime minister is the head of a "mafia-like" Albanian group responsible for smuggling weapons, drugs and human organs through eastern Europe, according to a Council of Europe inquiry report on organised crime.

Hashim Thaçi is identified as the boss of a network that began operating criminal rackets in the run-up to the 1998-99 Kosovo war, and has held powerful sway over the country's government since.

The report of the two-year inquiry, which cites FBI and other intelligence sources, has been obtained by the Guardian. It names Thaçi as having over the last decade exerted "violent control" over the heroin trade. Figures from Thaçi's inner circle are also accused of taking captives across the border into Albania after the war, where a number of Serbs are said to have been murdered for their kidneys, which were sold on the black market.

Legal proceedings began in a Pristina district court today into a case of alleged organ trafficking discovered by police in 2008. That case - in which organs are said to have been taken from impoverished victims at a clinic known as Medicus - is said by the report to be linked to Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) organ harvesting in 2000. It comes at a crucial period for Kosovo, which on Sunday held its first elections since declaring independence from Serbia in 2008. Thaçi claimed victory in the election and has been seeking to form a coalition with opposition parties.

On the same day that Iran published videos of its navy harassing US aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf earlier this year, Russian media are reporting that the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) says it has:

hit the ringleaders responsible for a terrorist attack on a military parade in Ahvaz on September 22, which killed 30 people and injured over 60.

In a statement published by its own outlet Sepah, the IRGC said its Aerospace Division targeted the "headquarters of the terrorists" east of the Euphrates in Syria. The statement was accompanied by photos of surface-to-surface missiles being launched. It claims that "a large number" of the terrorists were hit.

Before the IRGC announced the attack, videos were posted on social media purporting to show the moment of the launch. Some users said there were a total of eight missiles fired, and that two of them crashed shortly after being fired.

It was a pretty spectacular show of force by the Iranians:

All political leaders face issues and decisions which define their legacy. There are always times when their ability to truly lead are put to the test.

Richard Leonard has hardly been in his job of Scottish Leader of the British Labour Party but already his inadequacy for the job is plain for all to see. He is a relatively nice guy, I remember him from Stirling University Labour Club 37 years ago, but being nice is never enough to lead in the rough and tumble of politics. His performances at weekly Question Time debates in the Scottish parliament have been less than inspiring but his high profile intervention in last week's Labour Party Conference was not only tactically woeful it was also politically disgraceful.

He leads a party in Scotland battered and bruised by the miscalculations and arrogance of his predecessors who thought they had a divine right to rely on working people to vote Labour in Scotland. The big drift started under the Blair/Brown disaster wrapped up in illegal wars, renouncing of socialism, pathetic PFI/PPP schemes and the removal of free education through the introduction of tuition fees. Many of the most callous welfare attacks were also introduced under the watch of these guys from the early bedroom tax to private sector profit laden assessments of the disabled for benefit payments, Atos. The criminal deregulation of the banking sector and raiding of pension pots were also irresponsible and guided by free market ideology not socialist principles.

However the steady loss of support became a tsunami after the incredulous decision to join with the Tories in a unionist pact with the devil labelled 'Better Together' but which rapidly degenerated into 'Bitter Together' based on promoting fear, lies and distortions to dishonestly frighten enough people in 2014 to reject independence.

The United Kingdom is resettling Al Qaeda's Syrian medical unit, called the "White Helmets," as "refugees" in UK. The White Helmets organization is funded by UK's MI6 and America's CIA, and is headed by Raed Saleh, who was prohibited from visiting the US because he's a terrorist. These jihadists won't just have UK honors (and they already have: a Hollywood Oscar-winning 'documentary' full of lies about how 'heroic' the White Helmets are), but, presumably, they'll also obtain UK citizenship.

"The Syria White Helmets Exposed as US UK Agents" is a 4-minute video about them. It's an entirely accurate representation regarding their personnel and funding-sources. It even shows Al Qaeda in Syria executing a civilian; and, then, White Helmets - this 'humanitarian organization' - collecting his corpse just seconds later, as part of their 'heroic' work, for the US-and-allied invaders of Syria. The invading nations use Al Qaeda's Syrian branch to train and lead 'our' boots-on-the-ground fighters to overthrow Syria's secular, non-sectarian, Government, which is headed by the secular Shiite Bashar al-Assad. These US-Saudi-Israeli-allied proxy fundamentalist-Sunni-jihadist boots-on-the-ground do the actual dirty-work of killing people for their sponsoring aristocracies. In this particular instance the executioners are al-Nusra itself, which is Syria's Al Qaeda branch, and in that video they have eliminated yet another person that the US and UK aristocracies want to be eliminated.

The world will long remember the present immigrant crisis in Europe, which has negatively affected countless people there, and almost all countries. History will certainly record it as a major tragedy. Could it have been averted? Or kept within much more reasonable humane bounds?

After the United States and NATO began to bomb Libya in March 2011 - almost daily for more than six months! - to overthrow the government of Muammar Gaddafi (with the completely phoney excuse that Gaddafi was about to invade Benghazi, the Libyan center of his opponents, and so the United States and NATO were thus saving the people of that city from a massacre}, the Libyan leader declared:

"Now listen you people of Nato. You're bombing a wall, which stood in the way of African migration to Europe and in the way of al Qaeda terrorists. This wall was Libya. You're breaking it. You're idiots, and you will burn in Hell for thousands of migrants from Africa."

Remember also that Libya was a secular society, like Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, all destroyed by America while supporting Saudi Arabia and various factions of al Qaeda. It's these countries that have principally overrun Europe with refugees.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein's office will be investigated to determine whether it leaked a confidential letter from one of Brett Kavanaugh's accusers, Sen. Tom Cotton said Sunday.

Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, also said lawyers recommended to Christine Blasey Ford by Democrats will face a Washington, D.C., bar investigation for telling her that Senate Judiciary Committee staffers would not travel to California to interview her about her sexual-assault allegation.

"They have betrayed her," Cotton said on CBS' Face the Nation. "She has been victimized by Democrats ... on a search-and-destroy mission for Brett Kavanaugh."

He also said Democrats would be at fault if women become less likely to report sexual assaults now because they did not keep Ford's request confidential, as she had asked.

"Any impact that this entire episode has had," Cotton told John Dickerson, "on women's willingness to come forward and report sexual assault, which I encourage them all to do immediately after it happens, is caused by the Democrats, is caused by Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer not respecting her requests for confidentiality."

Much has made much of a deal struck between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in the Sochi this month over Syria's northwestern Idlib province.

Turkey's government-controlled press reacted to the news with near euphoria, reflecting relief that an anticipated Syrian government offensive against the rebel-held enclave had been forestalled. One columnist even suggested that Erdoğan, for whom good news has been scarce lately, be nominated for the Nobel peace prize . Elsewhere, many wondered if the deal had done more than buy Idlib, and Turkey, a temporary reprieve .

At present, Idlib is occupied by a fractious array of armed groups . Many have little in common besides their opposition to Syria's government - partly explaining why they seem to spend as much time fighting each other as their common enemy.

Turkey already has troops on the ground in this chaotic environment. They are deployed there, under the terms of a 2017 agreement with Russia and Iran, to man a dozen or so outposts along Idlib's border with neighbouring Syrian provinces , providing a barrier of sorts separating the rebels from Syrian government forces.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is desperately seeking to find a pretext to create a hype about Iran's nuclear program.

Zarif said in an excerpt of an interview set to air Sunday on CBS's Face the Nation that Netanyahu's latest attempt at the United Nations General Assembly, in which he put on show pictures of an alleged Iranian nuclear weapons storage site, was meant to conceal the regime's own nuclear arsenal. "He's just trying to find a smokescreen ... Nonsense," said Zarif of Netanyahu's accusations.

The top Iranian diplomat said that Netanyahu had repeatedly been proven wrong in his claims about Iran's nuclear program as shown by recurrent probes of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). "He's been wrong about the previous [allegations] and he's wrong about this one," said Zarif, adding, "The previous allegations that Netanyahu made have been investigated by the IAEA and have been rejected."

Zarif had earlier dismissed Netanyahu's claims about Iran's secret nuclear sites, saying in a tweet on Thursday that the Israeli regime was the only entity in the world that had always refused to disclose facts about its nuclear weapons.

"No arts & craft show will ever obfuscate that Israel is only regime in our region with a 'secret' and 'undeclared' nuclear weapons program - including an 'actual atomic arsenal'. Time for Israel to fess up and open its illegal nuclear weapons program to international inspectors," said the Iranian foreign minister in a tweet on Thursday.

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Arizona), the key figure behind the White House's decision to re-open an FBI investigation into SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh, has said he would have not called for the probe if he hoped to get re-elected.

Flake has served as a senator for Arizona since 2013. In October last year, he announced that he would not be competing for the seat in the looming congressional elections in November.

In an interview to CBS's 60 Minutes, the outgoing senator admitted that he would not have risked his chances of re-election by siding with Senate Judicial Committee Democrats in calling for the FBI investigation into sexual misconduct allegations against Kavanaugh if he wanted to keep his job.

"Not a chance," Flake admitted, adding that he would not have deviated from the party line. "There's no value to reaching across the aisle. There's no currency for that anymore. There's no incentive."

The 'elevator incident' was the turning point that prompted him to join Democrats in their calls for the FBI probe, he said.

It's often possible to determine just how stupid a tweet is by looking at the ratio of retweets to responses. Such is the case with one tweet posted by the Guardian's deputy political editor about Jeremy Corbyn last week.

Live-tweeting from the Labour Party conference in Liverpool, Pippa Crerar relayed to her followers a criticism that Corbyn had made during his speech about the mainstream media in Britain - but her framing of the comment was so purposely misleading and utterly disingenuous that it actually ended up proving the Labour leader's point.

Referencing a line in the speech during which Corbyn said the British press often "smear the powerless, not take on the powerful," Crerar feigned shock and disgust and wrote that "as a journalist" it made her "very uncomfortable" to hear Corbyn leading an "attack" on the free press. "Dangerous, Trumpian territory," she wrote. The tweet garnered 21 retweets, but more than 450 responses - most of which were in complete disagreement that Corbyn's comments were "Trumpian" in nature.