A prominent BBC journalist has deleted a tweet in which a senior Conservative MP can be seen complaining about the British media turning a blind eye to the corrupt relationship that has allowed Israel to "buy access" in Westminster.

The tweet was posted by the BBC's Political Editor Laura Kuenssberg on Wednesday while the Scottish journalist was covering the build up to the resignation of Priti Patel. The Secretary of State for International Development had taken part in undisclosed meetings in Israel organised by the powerful Conservative Friends of Israel lobby (CFI) last summer.

Kuenssberg's Twitter posts on the day were full of tweets on the Patel story including comments about Number 10 denying the allegation made by the Jewish Chronicle that Prime Minster Theresa May had been made aware of the 12 meetings Patel had had during her "family holiday" in Israel.

A Q&A with the historian Sir Max Hastings on worrisome parallels with the Great War.

Of all the famous things Mark Twain never actually said, perhaps none is repeated more often and with less justification than "history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes." And since the election of Donald Trump as president, history as verse has become a farce: He is Hitler, he is Stalin, he is Mao, he is Caligula, he is Cyrus the Great, he is Pharaoh, he is Joe McCarthy, he is Charles Lindbergh, he is King George III (both the sane and insane versions), he is Julius Caesar, he is Hamlet, he is the Know-Nothing Party, he is Charles Manson, he is Jimmy Carter, he is Andrew Jackson, he is Herbert Hoover, he is Woodrow Wilson, he is -- wait, what: Woodrow Wilson? Seriously?

"Ironically," writes Trygve Throntveit in Time, "Trumpism finds ample historical precedents in the immediate and long-term aftermath of U.S. intervention in World War I." He adds that in pledging to "make the world safe for democracy," Wilson was foreshadowing "Trump's make-America-great-and-safe-first foreign policy."

Hmmm. I'm not sure I'm sold that the 28^th president was the MAGA man of his day. 1 But it's a fresher take than the many uninformed comparisons of Trump to the Republican isolationists who followed Wilson, and thus a contribution to the growing body of journalistic analogies between our present moment and the era of the Great War. You can see the parallels, we are told, in Brexit, the backlash against immigrants in the U.S. and Europe, a radical autocracy in Russia roiling the West with propaganda, the collapse of order in the Middle East, secessionist movements in Europe (Serbia, meet Catalonia), and so on.

So, with this Veterans Day marking the centennial of the final year of the War to End All Wars, I decided to hash out which of these supposed historical echoes make sense, and whether lessons learned 100 years ago can help see us through the fraught present. And I was lucky enough to get to do so with Sir Max Hastings. This eminent British historian, newspaper journalist and TV broadcaster has written 26 books (his first, on the radical America of 1968, when he was 23) including one very relevant to this debate: "Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War" in 2013. So, pin a poppy to your lapel and read this lightly edited transcript of our chat:

The Kingdom of Bahrain has claimed that Friday's explosion on the only pipeline that supplies oil from Saudi Arabia was somehow linked to Iran, opening a new chapter of hostilities between Tehran and the Sunni Gulf states.

"The incident was an act of sabotage and a dangerous act of terrorism aimed at harming the higher interests of the nation and the safety of the people," read a statement from Bahrain's interior ministry. "Terrorist acts witnessed by the country in the recent period are carried out through direct contacts and instructions from Iran," the statement claimed.


While Bahrain often blames Iran for backing an insurgency that has plagued the country after authorities suppressed the so-called Arab Spring protests in 2011, Tehran has repeatedly denied any involvement. It also says that it is not behind the latest incident.

Special counsel Robert Mueller's team has questioned Sam Clovis, co-chairman of President Donald Trump's election campaign, to determine if Trump or top aides knew of the extent of the campaign team's contacts with Russia, two sources familiar with the investigation said on Friday.

The focus of the questions put to Clovis by Mueller's team has not been previously reported.

"The ultimate question Mueller is after is whether candidate Trump and then President-elect Trump knew of the discussions going on with Russia, and who approved or even directed them," said one source. "That is still just a question."

In late August Russia handed over decoded radar data to the Netherlands from the aerial zone where Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down on July 17, 2014. These materials had initially been provided in their original, i.e., non-decoded form, along with the software needed to decode them.

However, the Dutch investigators, despite being armed with the latest in modern technology as well as the assistance of their British colleagues, were not able to decode the recordings, and in the end they asked Russian experts to do it. In three years this has been the only time they have asked to collaborate. Never before had the commission accepted any Russian offers of assistance.

The decoded recordings clearly showed that the missile had been fired from the zone controlled by the Ukrainian military. And this is not some fabricated story concocted by journalists, but documented, technical information.

However, every sign seems to indicate that the decoded information obtained from Russia will not be included in the case file, but will instead face the fate of so much other data that does not fit neatly into the preferred version of the investigation. It will probably just fall into a black hole, which is what happened to the photos of the tragedy that were taken by American spy satellites.

Members of the US House of Representatives and Senate Armed Services committees announced Wednesday that they have reached agreement on the proposed $700 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the annual defense spending bill. This astronomical figure-an $80 billion increase over spending in 2016 and roughly $26 billion more than was requested by President Donald Trump-is a clear signal that the US will expand its ongoing wars around the world and is preparing to engage in far broader conflicts potentially involving North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China.

The NDAA will now be voted on by the House of Representatives, where it has been rubber-stamped every year since 1961, before being signed into law by Trump. While reporting by the bourgeois press on the NDAA has been limited overall, a key section of the bill, titled "Procurement Through Commercial E-Commerce Portals," has been almost entirely overlooked. This section establishes the framework whereby Amazon will be able to corner the market for Defense Department procurements worth roughly $53 billion, and its inclusion in the NDAA is a product of the direct links connecting Amazon with the state and military-intelligence apparatus.

Who's afraid of the Clintons? Not Donna Brazile.

The explosive book by the former head of the Democratic National Committee is rocking the political world with its tales of Hillary Clinton's brazen corruption and tawdry deceits. To add extra punch to her insider's account, Brazile is telling interviewers that Clinton's 2016 campaign was "sterile" and a "cult," and mocking it as sexless and joyless.

She even writes that she considered trying to replace Clinton as the nominee over health concerns after the candidate collapsed at the 9/11 anniversary ceremony, a fact that demolishes the myth that suspicions about Clinton's condition were the sole province of conservative partisans.

To say the Clinton camp is furious at what they regard as betrayal doesn't do justice to their outrage. They are attacking Brazile personally, accusing her of telling outright lies just to sell books.

Which is mighty rich when you consider the history of the Clintons.

The Saudi Ministry of Energy, Industry and Mineral Resources has tightened security at all its oil facilities following the Bahrain pipeline attack, it announce on Saturday.

It also suspended pumping oil to Bahrain after the attack on the crude oil pipeline.

The Energy Ministry also condemned this cowardly act.

Saudi Aramco said no casualties were reported in the incident.

And for quick reference here are the 33 from DC. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-0rmBG111gCXps0hTHj1A70LSCOMg_Ns/view

A study by the Riga-based NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence (StratCom) found that 2 out of 3 tweets about the NATO presence in the Baltic states are produced by robotic accounts, or Bots. Within the Russian Federation itself, this number rises to 84%.

"The study analyzed the situation in four countries - Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland. While Estonia has disproportionately frequently been targeted by bots, Poland and Lithuania have seen the least automated activity. Authors of the StratCom study have got an impression that the Twitter in Russian is policed less effectively than it is in English," reported The Baltic Times.