The claimed 'renovation' of a Shiite town in Saudi Arabia is an attempt by the Sunni government to drive the locals out, the Awamiya residents told RT, adding that troops fire upon people in streets as homes are being bulldozed.

The Saudi operation in Awamiya has been underway during the last three months, but "it has been very bad for the last 14 days," one of the residents told RT on the phone. The person asked to remain unanimous and for his voice to be modified due to fear of retaliation from the government.

"The city has been empty, completely empty. No movement on the streets, nobody's out because soldiers were actually around the city, just shooting everybody who's in the streets," he said.

"If you hear the sounds of shootings outside - it's almost like a war zone. It's not actually far from what's happening in Iraq and Syria," the witness to the Saudi operation added.

"Awamiya is under fire now," another resident said. "Random shooting is everywhere, shelling, but I think it's getting worse and worse. They started to use tanks against civilians."

The Australian foreign ministry is disavowing ties between two of its senior diplomats and the right-wing Israeli group NGO Monitor.

NGO Monitor has been involved in leveling smears targeting Australian aid to Gaza that Canberra has refuted.

On 4 August, NGO Monitor, which works closely with the Israeli government to attack human rights and aid organizations, sent out an email announcing three new members for its international advisory board.

One was Dave Sharma, who recently completed a four-year term as Australian ambassador to Tel Aviv. The other two are former Canadian and US diplomats.

"They join a number of distinguished individuals providing direction and council [sic] to NGO Monitor," the email stated.

The NGO Monitor website also lists Alexander Downer, Australia's ambassador in London - known officially as high commissioner - as a member of its advisory board.

A recent revelation, albeit quietly by choice, has been trickling under the popular western-dominated news radar. This under-reported, to the point of outright censored, exposé, has to do with Israel secretly providing weapons and military assistance to Khalifa Haftar, commander of the Libyan National Army (LNA), one of the factions in the so-called Libyan Civil War.

Libya has remained in a state of war for over six years - since 2011, when a western-concocted and directed uprising led to the demise of the country's leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. The strongest faction in war-torn and chaos-ridden Libya is the eastern-based Tobruk-led Government, which is affiliated with LNA, whose commander is Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, an old adversary of Gaddafi, who lived in the United States for several decades and became a U.S. citizen before returning to Libya in 2011.

We don't know why Rod Wheeler changed his story regarding the now-infamous Seth Rich report, but he did - and Fox News needs to put their story back up, continue investigating, and support their reporter Malia Zimmerman.

Wheeler has filed a lawsuit against the network and Ed Butowsky, who had offered the Rich family financial assistance to hire a private investigator. The lawsuit claims that Zimmerman had misquoted him and misrepresented his statements within her report.

She didn't.

Here are the quotes that Wheeler claims Zimmerman made up - and absolute proof that she did no such thing:

"My investigation up to this point shows there was some degree of email exchange between Seth Rich and Wikileaks."

Alarm bells ringing as rampant speculation breaks out over Pyongyang's 'possible' miniaturized nuclear warheads.

Beware the dogs of war. The same intel "folks" who brought to you babies pulled from incubators by "evil" Iraqis as well as non-existent WMDs are now peddling the notion that North Korea has produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead able to fit its recently tested ICBM.

That's the core of an analysis completed in July by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Additionally, US intel believes that Pyongyang now has access to up to 60 nuclear weapons. On the ground US intel on North Korea is virtually non-existent - so these assessments amount to guesswork at best.

But when we couple the guesswork with an annual 500-page white paper released earlier this week by the Japanese Defense Ministry, alarm bells do start ringing.

Commentaries in China's official media show growing Chinese anger at US grandstanding and intransigence on the North Korean issue.

If the Chinese or anyone else imagined that the sanctions resolution recently passed by the UN Security Council would calm tensions in the Korean Peninsula, they must by now be disabused of that illusion.

Though there have been no tests by North Korea since the UN Security Council vote - whether of ballistic missiles or nuclear weapons - the rhetoric instead of calming down has become heated. Moreover for once it is Washington rather than Pyongyang that has taken the initiative in the war of words.

Thus after days of unwise bragging by President Trump about the UN Security Council resolution - which he claims (wrongly) to have sponsored, and which - to their intense irritation - he has "thanked" the Chinese and Russians for - we have had first President Trump's "fire and fury" comment - which by the way looks to me calculated rather than spontaneous - and an almost equally belligerent statement from the US's Defense Secretary General Mattis.

By now it should be obvious that there is nothing that delights the North Korean leadership more than calling the US's bluff, so their response - wild and reckless threats of a missile demonstration around the US's base in Guam - was exactly as might have been expected.

Russia's constant trolling of US power [e.g #OpenSkies overflight of Langley instead of White Sands] is clearly an intentional policy. Similar trolling is seen on many of its social media accounts and its constant attempts to signal, in English, that it is behind many events that irritate the U.S. establishment. This includes constantly trying to steal credit for @wikileaks publication work.

All weak countries that feel threatened like to engage in deterring displays of strength and resolve but this is not the answer. Russia has a GDP less than South Korea or Spain and is surrounded by NATO bases and China, which has 7x the GDP and 10x the population. Sun Tzu's "Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak" explains Russia's strength displays but not obvious trolling. There is a difference between trolling and displays of strength. Trolling is designed to provoke reactions rather than to deter them. I do not know the answer but it is fascinating that no-one in the West is talking about it. This seems to be as a result of incentives.

Western security state interests want to hype up "threat" as opposed to "trolling" so as to increase their importance and budgets. Democrats want to hype up "threat" as opposed to "trolling" so as to foster their excuse for losing election narrative. Russian apologists and anti-Westerns want to make Russia look strong or honest so they also will not talk about Russian trolling. Germany is headed into an election so the Merkel camp are incentivized to increase perceptions of the Russian "threat" so as to make criticism of her government and its policies subject to neo-McCarthyisst suspicions.

But perhaps these observations about Western amplification and instrumentalization of the Russian "threat" provides a clue. The more the Russian security state can provoke a belligerent, threatening tone from the West the greater the domestic political support for defending Russia from these Western threats. This translates into increased budgets for Russia's security sector and greater unity, both within the state and between Russia's population and its state structures.

The US reportedly has a plan for a preemptive strike on North Korean missile sites with bombers stationed in Guam, should Donald Trump order it. It is apparently viewed as "the best of all bad options" amid mounting tensions between the states.

An attack by Rockwell B-1 Lancer supersonic heavy bombers from Andersen Air Force Base in the US territory of Guam makes up a major part of the plan, senior acting and retired military officials told NBC news.

"Of all the military options ... [President Donald Trump] could consider, this would be one of the two or three that would at least have the possibility of not escalating the situation," retired Admiral James Stavridis, former Supreme Allied Commander Europe and an NBC News analyst, said.

In the latest escalation between two nuclear powers (aside for the US and North Korea of course), the Indian Army has ordered the evacuation of a village close to the Doklam India-Bhutan-China tri-junction amid a standoff between Indian and Chinese solders, India's News 18 reports. This takes place just days after, as we reported earlier this week, China turned the war threat amplifier up to '11' by threatening India (in an article published a Chinese state-controlled newspaper) that it could conduct a "small-scale military operation" to expel Indian troops from a contested region in the Himalayas.

As a reminder, the latest standoff started in June, after Chinese troops started building a road on a remote plateau, which is disputed by China and Bhutan. Indian troops countered by moving to the flashpoint zone to halt the work, with China accusing them of violating its territorial sovereignty and calling for their immediate withdrawal.

A Russian Air Force observation plane entered secure airspace over Washington, DC, reportedly flying past the Pentagon and CIA before veering off to New Jersey, where Donald Trump is vacationing. US defense officials told media the jet had full clearance.

Two Russian observation flights over the Washington, DC, metropolitan area - authorized under the Open Skies Treaty signed by 34 nations including the US and Russia - made headlines in the American media on Wednesday.

Most outlets were particularly drawn to the fact the Russian Open Skies aircraft - converted from an old Tu-154M airliner - had allegedly been traveling at around 1,000 meters (3,700ft) over the DC metropolitan area.

According to CNN, the plane "overflew the US Capitol, the Pentagon, Central Intelligence Agency and Joint Base Andrews" in Maryland.