Israeli police have recommended that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu be indicted over allegations of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, though it's not the first time the embattled PM has faced scrutiny.

Netanyahu was quick to distance himself from the allegations, dismissing his own police force's claims on Tuesday as being "like Swiss cheese," saying that the truth would eventually surface and he'd be exonerated. RT takes a look back the scandals surrounding the under-fire PM, and other allegations leveled against his wife and son.

An editorial in the February 2nd Washington Post headlines "The Nunes memo shows the opposite of what Trump hoped it would prove", and its first argument is that "the memo reveals that there were preexisting [i.e., prior to the FBI's investigation into the DNC's infamous Steele dossier, which even Steele himself acknowledged was probably 10% to 30% false] grounds to investigate, based on information about a different Trump associate. So the president cannot construe this memo as offering evidence that the Russia probe began corruptly."

However, the Nunes Memo isn't alleging "that the Russia probe began corruptly." It is instead arguing that when the FBI's follow-on investigation reached the point where they would need permission from the FISA (or "FISC") court in order to obtain evidence that might possibly implicate US President Trump in impeachable offenses, the FBI resorted to an ilegal tactic to win the court's okay: hiding crucial material information from the FISA court. That's the case the Nunes Memo is actually summarizing.

Have you heard the latest nursery rhyme? "Hillary and Obama went up the hill. They both came down in handcuffs."

Don't laugh. It's not a joke. It's very real.

The noose tightened this week upon the entire FBI leadership over the scandal to destroy candidate Trump and then, President Trump. But it's no longer just the FBI leadership facing prison time for conspiracy and obstruction of justice. It's no longer just Hillary and her pals at the DNC and the Clinton Foundation facing prison time.

The real question now is what did Obama know and when did he know it.

The chiefs of six US intelligence agencies have claimed that Chinese phones might be used for spying. Beijing hit back, stating that not a single object in the world is entirely safe and mocking the American "sense of insecurity."


The concerns over the threat potentially posed by Chinese smartphones, namely produced by one of the main Apple rivals Huawei, were voiced on Tuesday during the Senate Intelligence Committee on worldwide threats. The chiefs of six intelligence agencies - the FBI's Christopher Wray, the CIA's Mike Pompeo, the NSA's Michael Rogers, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dan Coats, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Robert Ashley and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency Director Robert Cardillo - testified at the hearings.

The gathering focused on the usual "threats" to Washington, namely assertions relating to the alleged Russian attempts to interfere in various US elections and China's alleged goal of replacing the US as "the most powerful and influential nation on Earth."

On February 20, 2014, unknown snipers shot at people gathered on Kiev's central Maidan square, killing 49 protesters and four police officers. Local opposition leaders, as well as US and EU representatives, were quick to point a finger at the "regime of Viktor Yanukovych." Still, an official investigation failed to produce any results with the culprits still at large.

A Sputnik correspondent has met with the purported snipers, all of them from Georgia. They insist that they were taking orders from Maidan leaders. Moreover, they had direct orders to fire at police officers AND protesters in order to enrage the crowd and provoke a political crisis.
General Tristan Tsitelashvili, the former commander of the Georgian Army's elite Avaza unit, was the first to say that certain Georgian snipers were involved in the Maidan shooting. Tsitelashvili fought in Abkhazia and took part in the "five-day war" of August 2008, but later became a personal enemy of Mikheil Saakashvili, who tried to blame the military for his fiasco.

Tsitelashvili's house was raided by police who arrested the general and seriously injured his little son. They tried to force him to admit to having played a role in an alleged "plot by generals", which purportedly resulted in Georgia's defeat in the 2008 war. The general did not testify and has since been a sworn enemy of Saakashvili.

A year has passed since Russia launched military operations in Syria against the radical rebel groups, in what was seen by Syrian analysts as an intervention that has saved Syria from fragmentation.

Unlike the U.S.-led intervention with the pretext of fighting the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria, the Russian intervention to support the Syrian government forces is seen to have helped shift the course of actions on ground in favor of the Syrian government army, which has been facing an array of ultra-radical groups for over five years.

Local analysts said the Russian air force intervention has protected Syria from division, especially that many plans to fragment Syria were put forward in the shape of a political solution.

The Kremlin said on Friday that the Russian military support played a role in preventing the downfall of the capital city of Damascus in the hands of the rebels, noting that there is no time-frame for the Russian military intervention.

Just a few days after the downing of an Israeli fighter jet on Syrian territory, Tel Aviv has reportedly made another attempt to enter Syrian airspace using reconnaissance planes.

Israeli spy planes have been tackled by the Syrian air defense forces in the country's southwestern province of Quneitra, prompting these aircraft to retreat, according to the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA).

SANA reported that "Syrian air defenses have repelled Israeli surveillance planes over Quneitra, forcing them to leave Syrian airspace."

Russian President Vladimir Putin put an end to the confrontation between Israel and Iran in Syria and both sides accepted his decision. That's the apparent conclusion to be reached from the chain of events this past weekend.

On Saturday afternoon, after the second wave of bombardments by the Israel Air Force against Syrian targets and Iranian installations in Syria, senior Israeli officials were still taking a militant line and it seemed as if Jerusalem was considering further military action. Discussion of that ended not long after a phone call between Putin and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The official announcement by the Russian Foreign Ministry objected to the violation of Syrian sovereignty by Israel and totally ignored the event that provoked the eruption - the infiltration of an Iranian drone into Israeli airspace. In the conversation with Netanyahu a few hours later, Putin asked him to avoid moves that could lead to "a new round of dangerous consequences for the region."


The Russians are also concerned about the proximity of the Israeli bombings to sites where their soldiers and advisers are serving, including base T-4 near Palmyra, where the Iranian control post from which the anti-aircraft missile was fired was bombed.


The quiet after the Netanyahu-Putin call shows once again who's the real boss in the Middle East. While the United States remains the region's present absentee - searches are continuing for a coherent American foreign policy - Russia is dictating the way things are going. Moscow has invested too much effort and resources in saving Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime in recent years to allow Israel to foil its strategic project. One can assume messages of this nature were conveyed during the phone call with Netanyahu.

Look, I'm not saying that she couldn't potentially be useful to certain candidates in carefully-targeted districts (might she finally venture to such exotic locales as Wisconsin?), but I cannot imagine that the (surging) Republican Party is the least bit opposed to Hillary Clinton re-entering the political spotlight ahead of a challenging midterm election cycle. As I've written before, if she weren't doing so on her own accord, the GOP may have been forced to devise some way to actually pay her to get out there and "help." Well, Democrats, help is on the way:

Her emerging 2018 strategy, according to more than a dozen friends and advisers familiar with her plans, is to leverage the star power she retains in some Democratic circles on behalf of select candidates while remaining sufficiently below the radar to avoid becoming a useful target for Republicans seeking to rile up their base...Most likely, they said, Clinton will attempt to help Democratic candidates who have a history of supporting her and her family..."She's not going to be up front," said Jaime Harrison, a former chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party and an associate chairman of the Democratic National Committee...Clinton's team also understands that, although she remains popular with many Democrats, she could be a hindrance to candidates running in Trump country.

Iran has repeatedly strongly refuted claims of its troops' presence in Syria, however, admitted sending military advisors to help the Syrian government fight terrorists. Tehran has also been acting as one of the guarantors of the ceasefire regime in the Arab Republic and as a broker in peace talks.

Ali Akbar Velayati, the top aide of Iranian Supreme Leader, has demanded the US military pullout from Syria as it is "there without the permission" of Damascus.

When asked to comment on the demand voiced earlier in the day by US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson concerning Tehran's withdrawal from the country, Velayati was quoted as saying by ISNA, "Iran's military presence in Syria was based on invitation of the Syrian government."

Earlier in the day, Tillerson also voiced concern over the recent incidents in Syria, involving Israel, apparently referring to the events of February 10 when the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) reported that one of their Apache attack helicopters downed an Iranian unmanned aerial vehicle over the disputed Golan Heights.