Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan held a phone conversation on Saturday, during which they discussed missile strikes of the United States and its allies on Syria and agreed to intensify bilateral cooperation aimed at political settlement of the Syrian crisis.

"The Russian and the Turkish sides proceed from the fact that in the light of what has happened it is necessary to intensify bilateral cooperation aimed at real progress in the process of a political settlement in Syria," the Kremlin press statement says.

During the conversation, the parties discussed the tensions around Syria, which escalated as a result of the missile strikes conducted by the United States and its allies, it added.

"The Russian president stressed that the actions of a group of Western countries grossly violate the UN Charter and the fundamental norms and principles of international law," Kremlin said.

On Friday night, the United States, France, and the United Kingdom launched strikes on a number of targets in Syria in response to the alleged chemical incident in the Damascus' suburb of Duma. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, the three countries fired over 100 cruise and air-to-surface missiles, most of which were shot down by Syrian air defense. Putin described the attacks as an act of aggression against a sovereign state, noting that neither Russian military experts nor local residents confirmed the fact of a chemical attack, which became a pretext for strikes.

The Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation, Sergey Lavrov, threw a bombshell at the British assertions that the collapse of the British secret agent Sergej Skripal and his daughter Yulia on March 4 in Salisbury was caused by a 'Novichok' nerve agent 'of a type developed by Russia'. (See our older pieces, linked below, for a detailed documentation of the case.)

• The Skripal poisoning happened on March 4.
• Eye witnesses described the Skripals as disoriented and probably hallucinating. The emergency personal suspected Fentanyl influence.
• A few days later the British government claimed that the Skripals had been affected by a chemical agent from the 'Novichok' series which they attributed to Russia. It insinuated that the Skripals might die soon.
• A doctor of the emergency center at the Salisbury District Hospital publicly asserted that none of its patients was victim of a 'nerve agent'.
• On March 14, after much pressure from Russia, Britain finally invited the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to analyze the blood of the victims and to take environmental samples.
• The OPCW arrived on March 19 and took specimen on the following days. It also received a share of the samples taken earlier by the British chemical weapon laboratory in Porton Down, which is only some 10 miles away from Salisbury.
• The OPCW split the various samples it had in a certified laboratory in the Netherlands and then distributed them to several other certified laboratories for analysis.
• One of those laboratories was the highly regarded Spiez Laboratory in Switzerland which is part of the Swiss Federal Office for Civil Protection and fully certified.
• On April 12 the OPCW published a public version of the result of the analyses it had received from its laboratories.
• A more extensive confidential version was given to the state members that make up the OPCW.

During a public speech yesterday Lavrov stated of the OPCW report:

[A] detailed and fairly substantial confidential version was distributed to the OPCW members only. In that report, in accordance with the OPCW way of conduct, the chemical composition of the agent presented by the British was confirmed, and the analysis of samples, as the report states, was taken by the OPCW experts themselves. It contains no names, Novichok or any other. The report only gives the chemical formula, which, according to our experts, points to an agent that had been developed in many countries and does not present any particular secret.

After receiving that report Russia was tipped off by the Spiez Laboratory or someone else that the OPCW report did not include the full results of its analysis.

French euro-sceptic and left-wing politicians are falling on the country's government for following the US's lead, as it took part in airstrikes and betrayed its interests. According to a recent report, the French security services have secretly been fighting Daesh in Syria to counter the terror threat at home.

French Secret War on Terror

A recent report by the French outlet Le Figaro has revealed that France has perpetrated its own secret war against Daesh in Syria and Iraq for several years. It targeted the militants, who came to fight there from France, as the authorities want to prevent French-made jihadists from returning to their homeland. There have been about 1,700 such fighters registered; 300 of them have already returned to France and are on the watch list. Hundreds are detained and at least 300 were killed.

According to the media, there are two special groups within both the French military intelligence and interior security services listing targets for elimination. Orders concerning especially valuable members of terror groups of French origin are reported to come from the highest state level. From 2013 till 2017, at least 50 such targets were killed.

Russia has its own 'red lines' regarding a UN Security Council resolution on Syria, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said, adding that Moscow is going to study the draft by the US, UK, and France with a critical eye.

It is going to be "very difficult" for the Security Council member states to find a compromise on the Syrian resolution, Ryabkov warned. "I don't want to make assumptions on how the work will go on, but one has to understand that we have obvious 'red lines.' Probably, there are some kind of important 'red lines' for the Western group as well."

"We're going to evaluate the proposal of the Western troika with a critical eye. We don't decide anything for ourselves in advance - if there are reasonable elements there, we're going to work on them," he said.

The deputy foreign minister added that Moscow will use all possible means to pull relations with the West out of a dangerous "political nosedive." The channels of communication between Moscow and Washington are still open, he said.

It was clear from the first few minutes of War secretary Mattis's press conference last night that these strikes were going to be symbolic. They change nothing on the ground militarily. Russia's threat to respond worked - the US essentially backed down.

Far more important is the damage Trump did to himself politically. One can only guess at the pressures brought to bear on him to take this suicidal (politically) act. I'm starting to think that this whole charade, starting with the Skripal poisoning a month ago, was an elaborate plot to mortally damage his presidency, not to achieve anything in Syria - well, if so, the plotters have succeeded.

Trump has said and done many things that can hurt him over the past 18 months, but nothing as bad as standing up in front of the American people, and with great solemnity and invoking WW1 gassings, 'nobility' of warriors, prayer, and all this sort of talk, telling one whopping lie after another, looking straight into the camera. He knows they are lies, and a good chunk of the American electorate knows they are - I'm guessing 30% of the whole, and a good 50% of his base. That is not something you can come back from.

He just burned his bridges with a lot of people who think telling the truth is important. [Transcript below and lies are highlighted.]

It has been over two weeks since the Ecuadorian government silenced award-winning WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, and former President Rafael Correa is now warning that his days inside the embassy are numbered.

According to a report from ABC International, Correa told reporters during a meeting with the media at the International Press Club of Madrid that current Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno is caving to pressure from the United States.

Correa claimed that at the first sign of pressure from the United States, Lenin will throw the heroic publisher out of the embassy where he was granted political asylum in 2012. Assange has been residing at the embassy for nearly six years, over concerns that the UK government will arrest him and extradite him to the US for the apparent crime of committing journalism.

Ecuador attempted to give Assange diplomatic status last year after making him an official citizen, but the UK rejected it.

While the lack of retaliation by Russia to Trump's Friday night Syrian airstrikes surprised some, Russia defended its stance of shrugging in response (and not escalating to full blown world war), by asserting that Soviet-made missiles intercepted more than half of the 105 cruise missiles fired at three Syrian facilities (the Pentagon denied any missiles were hit), and that the US, UK and French blitz was generally less aggressive than most had feared, perhaps thanks to extensive advance warnings by Trump that an attack was imminent.

Yet if Russia's managed response is understandable, one country whose vocal outcry to US strikes has been a surprise, is China.

As we reported yesterday, China was the first superpower outside those directly involved to slam the US airstrikes: "Any unilateral military action violates the United Nations charter and its principles and international law and its principles. [The strikes] are also going to add more factors to complicate the resolution of the Syrian crisis," Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said in a statement on Saturday afternoon.

Beijing also called for an investigation into claims of a Syrian poison gas attack on the rebel-held town of Douma that rescuers and monitors say killed more than 40 people, and prompted the Western action: "The Chinese side believes a comprehensive, impartial and objective investigation should be conducted into the suspected chemical attacks and it should come up with reliable conclusions ... Before this, no conclusion by any side should be made," Hua said.

Andrew McCabe, onetime acting FBI director, leaked a self-serving story to the press and later lied about it to his boss and federal investigators, prompting a stunning fall from grace that ended in his firing last month, says a bombshell report released Friday by the Justice Department's internal watchdog.

Inspector General Michael Horowitz, appointed by President Barack Obama, had been reviewing FBI and DOJ actions leading up to the 2016 presidential election.

The report, handed over to Congress on Friday and obtained by Fox News, looked at a leak to The Wall Street Journal about an FBI probe of the Clinton Foundation.

The report says that McCabe authorized the leak and then misled investigators about it, leaking in a way that did not fall under a "public interest" exception.

DOJ IG releases explosive report that led to firing of ex-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe by Fox News on Scribd

None of the missiles that were launched by the US and its allies entered Russian air defense zones that protect facilities in Tartus and Khmeimim, the Russian Defense Ministry said.

Warplanes and vessels of the US Air Force, together with French and UK allies, "launched a missile strike on civilian and military facilities" in Syria early Saturday morning, the ministry said in a statement. None of the cruise missiles launched by the US and its allies reached the Russian air defense zones that shield the facilities in the port city of Tartus and the Khemimim air base, it added.

The war-ravaged Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta has been completely liberated from militant groups, the Syrian Army has confirmed. The statement comes after the last militants left Douma. The Syrian armed forces have seized all the towns and villages located in the Damascus suburb, the statement issued late Saturday said. They also confirmed that all members of the armed groups have left the area - particularly Douma, which was the last major militant stronghold in Eastern Ghouta.

Syrian engineering units have already started to clear away the rubble and remove mines and improvised explosive devices left behind by the militants. While searching through the ruins, Syrian forces found ammunition factories and weapons depots, as well as a large number of tunnels in the area. The Russian Defense Ministry earlier deployed military police to the liberated area to team up with Syrian law enforcement and begin the registration of local residents.