A law enforcement sensitive document written by senior Justice Department official, Bruce Ohr, is raising serious concerns amongst congressional investigators regarding testimony provided to Congress on the involvement of FBI special agents in the probe into the Trump campaign and its alleged Russian ties.

Nov. 21, 2016, the handwritten document lists former FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok, his paramour FBI Attorney Lisa Page and Special Agent Joe Pientka (who along with Strzok interviewed former National Security Advisor Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn).

Strzok, who was the lead investigator in the FBI's investigation into Trump, was removed last August from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation after the DOJ's Inspector General discovered a barrage of anti-Trump text messages between him and Page. Page, who was working as the general counsel for now fired Deputy Attorney General Andrew McCabe, is no longer with the FBI.

Estonia has halted a NATO aerial military drill in the Baltic country bordering Russia after a missile was accidentally shot by a Spanish fighter jet this week.

Estonia's Defense Minister Juri Luik said that the air-to-air missile was erroneously launched Tuesday in its southern region near the border with Russia.

Estonia, a tiny member of the West's North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) with 1.3 million population, says it yet unclear why the missile was misfired.

Luik added that the missile had not been found anywhere, but there were no reports of casualties.

It looks like Mueller's prosecutors can't take the heat.

Rick Gates, Paul Manafort's former business associate took the witness stand Monday afternoon in the bank fraud and tax evasion case against Manafort.

After jurors were dismissed, scolded one of Mueller's prosecutors and a 10-minute courtroom spat ensued.

FOX News reported, at one point Judge Ellis felt disrespected after one of Mueller's prosecutors [Greg Andres] looked down instead of looking directly at him and screamed, "Look at me!"

This week Vice President Pence announced that the Department of Defense is beginning a planning process to establish a sixth military branch, known as the Space Force. Pence's statement was a public reassurance that Trump's sudden announcement of the Space Force was not just another of the president's frequent sudden announcements that have no connection to reality. Pence claimed that this new Space Force military division will be in place by 2020, and while many in the media are reacting as if the militarization of space were a sudden departure from American policy, as with much of the Trump presidency, this policy shift is only a minor, more grotesque version of what our government has long routinely undertaken.

Links between the American space program and military have long been one-part open secret, and one-part open question. It has always been difficult to determine just how much of NASA's budget can properly be considered military spending. A few years ago while starting to work on a paper examining Margaret Mead and other anthropologists' work on a 1950s and 60s program designed to measure and shape US public attitudes about space (known as Project Man in Space), I had assumed I would find a basic critical analysis, akin to Gore Vidal's famous 1988 essay on "The National Security State," in which Vidal's analysis of mandatory and discretionary spending revealed that the American military's budget was far larger than the meek 37% appearing at first glance (when only considering the listed DoD budget), and once all military linked projects at agencies ranging from Department of Energy, Department of State, Veteran's Benefits, and foreign arms deal aid packages, and other defense related projects not included in the Department of Defense budget, could be understood to make up not a minority of the federal budget but approaching 77% of the budget. And while I found many excellent contemporary and historical analysis of the links between NASA and military space projects, I could not find straight forward numbers stating how much of the money the US government spends on space goes to military linked projects.

It has taken more than 20 years. But on August 12, the leaders of Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Turkmenistan will meet in the Kazakh port city of Aqtau, reportedly to sign a new convention on the legal status of the Caspian Sea.

An 18-page draft of the agreement, posted briefly on Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev's website in June and obtained by RFE/RL, lists 24 articles, including territorial waters, maritime borders, rules for navigation, fishing rights, environmental matters, and, importantly, use of the sea's resources.

The Caspian seabed hides some 50 billion barrels of oil and nearly 9 trillion cubic meters of gas in proven or probable reserves. At current market prices, that is several trillion dollars' worth of energy resources; with further exploration, it could turn out to be much more.

So it is perhaps unsurprising that it has taken this long to reach a deal on the Caspian's legal status.

Debate has always hinged on whether the Caspian is a "sea" or a "lake." It is an inland body of water, with no exits to any seas or oceans. The draft suggests the five littoral states will agree in Aqtau that the Caspian is a sea.

The global silence over Israel's hopes that "the Iranian regime would disappear entirely from this world" stands in stark contrast to the worldwide outrage over similarly phrased wishes on behalf of Iran 12 years ago to see its Zionist enemy "vanish from the pages of time".

International Relations are characterized by double standards because each actor is striving to advance their own interests first and foremost with only a secondary regard for "ideological consistency", and a recent reminder of that happened earlier this week when the world was silent after the Israeli "Minister" of Public Security Gilad Erdan channeled the previously condemned words of his entity's hated foe former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Erdan controversially said the following in an interview with Israel Radio:

"It would be better if the Iranian regime would disappear entirely from this world..."

There was no reaction from any international leaders to this statement, unlike the global outbreak of furor in 2006 after Ahmadinjad said something very similar when he famously remarked that:

"The regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time."

State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert deflected questions about a US-backed Saudi airstrike that killed dozens of children in Yemen, instead choosing to highlight "Houthi attacks" against Saudi Arabia.

The State Department has "seen the news reports" about a Saudi-led coalition airstrike that killed at least 50 people and wounded more than 70 - most of whom were children - in northern Saada, Yemen, but "can't confirm all the details because we are not there on the ground," Nauert told reports during a press briefing on Thursday.

She added that the United States is "certainly concerned" about the "reports," and "regrets any loss of civilian life." Nauert also urged Saudi Arabia to launch a "thorough and transparent investigation into the incident."


Insisting that she had no other details or information on the matter, Nauert then chided reporters at the briefing for ignoring the "devastation" in Yemen.

So the US news media are in uproar over President Trump's latest admission that a meeting between his son and a Russian lawyer more than two years ago was about "getting dirt" on Hillary Clinton.

With self-righteous probity, Trump's political and media enemies are declaring him a felon for accepting foreign interference in the US presidential election.

Admittedly, President Trump appears to have been telling lies about the past meeting, which took place at Trump Tower in New York City in the summer of 2016. Or maybe it's just this American president shooting himself in the foot - again - with his inimical gibberish-style.

However, the burning issue of "foreign interference" is being stoked out of all proportion by Trump's enemies who want him ousted from the White House.

US constitutional law forbids candidates from receiving help from foreign governments or foreign nationals.

Billionaire said Britain would be 'perfectly successful' outside of the EU, but is now opting to leave

Sir Jim Ratcliffe, Britain's wealthiest man and a key Brexit backer, has decided to leave the UK and live in Monaco.

Despite his previous claims that the UK would be "perfectly successful" outside of the European Union (EU), the billionaire has chosen to leave the country of his birth and move to the principality, whose residents do not pay income tax, on the Mediterranean coast.

Sir Jim, founder and CEO of the chemicals giant Ineos, was named as the richest man in Britain in this year's Sunday Times rich list, with an estimated fortune of £21bn.

A Russian warship in the Mediterranean Sea reportedly tracked down a US nuclear-powered submarine this spring. The incident took place in April, the month the US, UK, and France launched airstrikes against Syria.

The frigate Admiral Essen of the Russian Black Sea Fleet managed to track down one of the Ohio-class submarines currently in service with the US Navy, Izvestia newspaper revealed on Friday, citing a source in the Russian Navy. The Russian ship left Sevastopol, a major Black Sea port located on the Crimean Peninsula, on March 13 and returned on June 30. The frigate was deployed most of the time in the Mediterranean Sea.

The pursuit lasted more than two hours, during which the Russian ship recorded the basic parameters of the American submarine, which will be deciphered and added to the acoustic characteristics of the submarine. Izvestia said the USS Georgia, a cruise missile submarine, was the one that might have been tracked by the Russian Navy.