In recent weeks, a series of man-made tragedies have struck Britain. From terror attacks to the Grenfell Tower inferno. UK citizens have been grieving for the victims, and fighting to prevent future tragedies. Meanwhile, Theresa May was busy elsewhere - trying to seal a deal for the wholesale takeover of UK media by Rupert Murdoch.

The Sky deal

Rupert Murdoch tried to take full control of Sky in 2011. But the phone hacking scandal and revelations from the Leveson inquiry forced the government to withdraw support. And the deal fell through.

Just a few years later, Murdoch is at it again. This time, 21st Century Fox is putting up £11.7bn to buy out the 61% of Sky that the Murdochs don't already own. The deal would give Murdoch an unprecedented ownership of UK media. Labour MP David Winnick expressed serious concern about the near-monopoly this would create for Murdoch, saying "it would be simply unacceptable that the amount of media ownership he already controls should be increased".

The Murdochs have expressed confidence that, this time, the deal will go though. So have industry insiders. They're pleased this time that other events are keeping the deal well away from the front pages.

Democrats' embarrassing special-election loss in Georgia, after the liberal media built up unrealistic expectations, has provoked a wave of bitter blowback that targets House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi.

As Axios notes, it's part of a generational argument that's also driving the party's 2020 conversation.

"It was a very rough night for Nancy Pelosi," said Sean Clegg, a Democratic strategist in San Francisco, adding that he was personally a big fan of hers.

"Republican messaging attacking Pelosi appeared to be more effective than Democratic messaging against Trump. That's a problem going forward, and it's going to be a challenge in House races particularly."

"I think the problem is we have not come up with an agenda and then we need a strategy to communicate it," Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., said.

"We can't just be against something."

Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, seems to be championing a single cause: Israel.

When Haley speaks about Israel, her language is not merely emotive nor tailored to fit the need of a specific occasion. Rather, her words are resolute, consistent and are matched by a clear plan of action.

Along with Haley, the right wing Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu is moving fast to cultivate the unique opportunity of dismissing the UN, and thus, any attempt at criticizing the Israeli occupation.

Unlike previous UN ambassadors who strongly backed Israel, Haley refrains from any coded language or any attempt, however poor, to appear balanced. Last March, she told a crowd of 18,000 supporters at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's (AIPAC) annual policy conference that this is a new era for US-Israel relations.

"I wear heels. It's not for a fashion statement," she told a crowd thrilled by her speech. "It's because if I see something wrong, we're going to kick 'em every single time."

An interceptor missile fired from a US Navy destroyer off the coast of Hawaii failed to hit the target, the US Missile Defense Agency said. The failure follows last month's successful test of a ground-based interceptor against an ICBM-like target.

On Wednesday evening local time, a medium-range ballistic missile was fired from the Pacific Missile Range Facility at Kauai, Hawaii, the MDA said in an official statement about the test.

The destroyer USS John Paul Jones (DDG 53) tracked the missile with its onboard AN/SPY-1 radar, part of the Aegis Baseline 9.C2 weapon system. The ship fired a SM-3 Block IIA guided missile, but did not hit the target.

"A planned intercept was not achieved," the MDA statement said. "Program officials will conduct an extensive analysis of the test data. Until that review is complete, no additional details will be available."

Russian Aerospace Forces Commander Viktor Bondarev has confirmed that the new Tu-160M2 strategic bomber would take to the skies in March 2018. Military analyst Viktor Tuchkov says that with an estimated combat effectiveness two and a half times greater than its predecessor, the Tu-160M2 is more advanced than anything the US has in its arsenal.

In an interview with Krasnaya Zvezda ('Red Star'), the official newspaper of the Russian Ministry of Defense earlier this week, Col. Gen. Bondarev said that the first Tu-160M2 would take off for state trials in the spring, adding that the air force expects to receive about three-four planes per year in the years thereafter.

In addition to the deep modernization of the 16 Tu-160 Beliy Lebed ('White Swan') bombers already in service with the Russian Aerospace Forces, the Russian defense industry will also incorporate the improvements of the Tu-160M2 in the production of new Tu-160s. Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree to restart production of the Tu-160 at the Tupolev Aircraft Factory in Kazan earlier this year. The company has also been instructed to begin work on the PAK-DA, the next generation Russian strategic bomber.

Commenting on Bondarev's remarks, independent military analyst and Svobodnaya Pressa contributor Vladimir Tuchkov wrote that the discussion of flight testing beginning next spring, a year earlier than originally planned, seems to indicate that the time frame for the Tu-160M2's delivery to the military has been dramatically shortened.

The Turkish National Defense Ministry said that the US promised to provide a list of weapons it had supplied to the Kurds and would secure their return after "victory" over terrorists.

The US Department of Defense has pledged to Turkey that it will provide a list of weapons it supplied to the Kurds and will secure their return after "victory" over terrorists in Syria, the Turkish National Defense Ministry said in a statement obtained by Sputnik on Thursday.

"In a letter to Turkey's National Defense Minister Fikri Isik, the head of the Pentagon, James Mattis, announced his intention to provide Turkey with a list of arms supplied to the Kurdish YPG [People's Protection Units] formations," the ministry said.

Hosting Sergey Lavrov yesterday the French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian accused Syria's Assad of carrying out "mass killings" (without presenting any evidence) and demanded that these hypothetical killings stop. (Note: that stops well short of demanding that "Assad must go".)

Other than that it was all music to Russian ears. Le Drian said France and Russia were "facing the same threat of terrorism", claimed France was "neither looking to isolate Russia from the rest of Europe nor weaken it economically", insisted Macron's administration wants to "work together in a pragmatic and concrete way" with Moscow.

The French FM also pointed out French business has continued investing in Russia in spite of EU sanctions, congratulated himself on the quality of his relationship with Lavrov, and insisted the two could now enter into concrete talks to help resolve the conflict in Syria.

The U.S. military and/or the CIA outsourced parts of their ongoing torture campaign in Yemen to the United Arab Emirates, reports AP. Some "interrogations" are done in the presence of U.S. personal and on U.S. ships:

MUKALLA, Yemen (AP) — Hundreds of men swept up in the hunt for al-Qaida militants have disappeared into a secret network of prisons in southern Yemen where abuse is routine and torture extreme — including the "grill," in which the victim is tied to a spit like a roast and spun in a circle of fire, an Associated Press investigation has found.

Senior American defense officials acknowledged Wednesday that U.S. forces have been involved in interrogations of detainees in Yemen but denied any participation in or knowledge of human rights abuses.
...
At one main detention complex at Riyan airport in the southern city of Mukalla, former inmates described being crammed into shipping containers smeared with feces and blindfolded for weeks on end. They said they were beaten, trussed up on the "grill," and sexually assaulted. According to a member of the Hadramawt Elite, a Yemeni security force set up by the UAE, American forces were at times only yards away.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on Thursday called on Western media, specially those in the United States, to turn their attention to the reports about unidentified helicopters allegedly supporting Daesh militants in Afghanistan.

On June 14, Daesh militants managed to capture the majority of the Tora Bora cave complex in Afghanistan's eastern Nangarhar province, Zakharova added.

"We have paid our attention to the reports of the transportation by the helicopters having no identification marks of IS Afghan wing's militants as well as arms and ammunition for them, now in the east of Afghanistan," Zakharova said at a regular press briefing adding that a member of the Iraqi parliament's lower house publicly said these vehicles belonged to the United States.

Attorney Dan Kovalik has written an extremely important book that challenges the current media/political focus on "Russia-gate" and warns that dark forces of war are taking us in an ever more dangerous direction. The book, released just a few weeks ago, has received high praise from numerous writers.

In his foreword to the book, best selling author David Talbot says:

"The US war machine has revived the tried and true Red Scare.... This massive anti-Russian propaganda campaign is one of the biggest fake news operations in U.S. history.... Unlike our war-obsessed media, human rights lawyer Dan Kovalik does understand that peace and diplomacy are in the best interests of the American and Russian peoples. His book is an urgently needed counterassault against the propaganda forces that are trying to push us over a precipice that it too terrifying to even contemplate. It's time for all of us to speak truth to power before it's too late."

Talbot's warning is not hyperbole. As I write this review, the US military is pushing ever closer to direct military confrontation with Syria, Iran and Russia in Syria.