Long ago, it was settled that resistance and even armed struggle against a colonial occupation force is not just recognised under international law but specifically endorsed.

In accordance with international humanitarian law, wars of national liberation have been expressly embraced, through the adoption of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 (pdf), as a protected and essential right of occupied people everywhere.

Finding evolving vitality in humanitarian law, for decades the General Assembly of the United Nations (UNGA) - once described as the collective conscience of the world - has noted the right of peoples to self-determination, independence and human rights.

Indeed, as early as 1974, resolution 3314 of the UNGA prohibited states from "any military occupation, however temporary".

In relevant part, the resolution not only went on to affirm the right "to self-determination, freedom and independence [...] of peoples forcibly deprived of that right,[...] particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes or other forms of alien domination" but noted the right of the occupied to "struggle ... and to seek and receive support" in that effort.

The scandal around the US officials allegedly colluding with the Russian government has been "overblown" and serves to "to take the president off his agenda," Donald Trump's new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci has said.

On Sunday, the newly appointed White House communications director appeared on CNN's State of the Union program addressing questions on alleged Trump-Russia interactions.

"I was there early on in the campaign. I didn't have any interactivity with the Russians. I didn't see anybody have interactivity with the Russians. It is a completely bogus and nonsensical thing," Scaramucci told host Jake Tapper. "You guys have to manufacture these scandals to take the president off his agenda," he added.

Scaramucci also spoke to Fox News, telling host Chris Wallace, "I think that the Russian situation is completely overblown." He added, that he too has been falsely accused of conspiring with the Russians.

Last month, CNN published a story, claiming that Scaramucci, who was a part of Trump's transition team, along with Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, had been under a Senate investigation over a meeting with a Russian investment bank CEO. The network later retracted the story, apologizing to Scaramucci, while the three journalists involved have resigned.

With Trump tweeting Saturday that "the US president has complete power to pardon," Scaramucci was asked to comment on reports that Trump is considering using his power to pardon his family members, aides and himself in light of the Russia probe. "The president is thinking about pardoning nobody," he emphasized. "He hasn't done anything wrong," Scaramucci said.

As a new report by the Army War College tracks the loss of "US primacy" around the world, it prescribes more of the same; propaganda, surveillance and war.

It's public knowledge that, from the point of view of the Pentagon, the United States faces five existential threats: Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and terrorism, in that order. Way beyond rhetoric, all Pentagon actions should be understood and analyzed under this framework.

Now global public opinion may have access to an even more intriguing document; a new study by the Army War College titled 'At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primacy World'. Readers are actively encouraged to download it and study the fine print.

Researcher Nafeez Ahmed has proposed some helpful decoding of this "post-primacy" predicament that took virtually ten months to be put together.

The intellectual firepower concerned involved all sections of the Pentagon scattered around the world, as well as the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Intelligence Council, and proverbial neocon-heavy think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the RAND Corporation, and the Institute for the Study of War.

The devastation in Mosul and Aleppo are comparable, Professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi told RT, and yet the Western media only choose to highlight the suffering in the Syrian province and downplays the plight of those in the Iraqi city.

Marandi, a professor at the University of Tehran, visited Mosul with his colleagues after receiving an invitation from his Iraqi counterparts.

"The city is almost empty. People's lives have been completely destroyed," Marandi said. "The devastation across the city, and it's the second-most important city in Iraq, is extraordinary."

"Those we spoke to were all seemed very pleased for the city to have been retaken, but they all said the American airstrikes were very devastating and very hurtful to ordinary people, and many civilians were killed," according to Marandi.

What did the CIA's covert assistance program for Syrian rebels accomplish? Bizarrely, the biggest consequence may be that it helped trigger the Russian military intervention in 2015 that rescued President Bashar al-Assad - achieving the opposite of what the program intended.

Syria adds another chapter to the star-crossed history of CIA paramilitary action. These efforts begin with the worthy objective of giving presidents policy options short of all-out war. But they often end with an untidy mess, in which rebels feel they have been "seduced and abandoned" by the promise of U.S. support that disappears when the political winds change.

One Syrian opposition leader highlighted for me the danger for his rebel comrades now: "The groups that decided to work with the U.S. already have a target on their back from the extremists, but now will not be able to defend themselves."

Sweden is preparing to hold what it calls the "first and largest" exercise of its kind in over 20 years involving all of its military branches as well as troops from several NATO countries, to boost its deterrence capabilities, the Swedish military said.

The exercise, Aurora 17, which is scheduled for September, is designed to strengthen Sweden's defense capabilities and create a "credible and visible" deterrent that would force any potential enemies "to carefully consider the risks of attacking our country," the Swedish Armed Forces said in statement.

Some 19,000 soldiers from all military branches are expected to participate in the exercise, which will be conducted in the air, on land and at sea. The major training areas will be in the southeastern Stockholm-Maelaren region and the Gothenburg area, as well as on and around the island of Gotland, not far from the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.

Moscow is making rapid progress in its drive to set up four de-escalation zones across Syria, agreed in May, the defense ministry announced. Russia says the area under government control has quadrupled since the start of Moscow's operations in the region.

On Monday, Russian military police set up two checkpoints and four observation posts around the key rebel-held area of Eastern Ghouta, General Sergey Rudskoy, spokesman for the Russian General Staff, revealed during a scheduled press briefing in Moscow.

Moscow said that on July 21 and 22, two checkpoints and 10 observations posts were established around another de-escalation zone near the country's southwestern border with Israel and Jordan. The zone was demarcated earlier this month, and signed off by Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump.

"The measure will help maintain the ceasefire, allow unfettered access for humanitarian aid, and enable refugees and displaced persons to return," Rudskoy said. "Thanks to measures taken by Russia, we have managed to halt fighting two crucial areas of Syria."

Rudskoy added that "consultations are ongoing" over the exact borders of the northern zone in Idlib, close to Aleppo, which is the biggest of the proposed zones, housing more than one million people.

The proposal for the four de-escalation zones was signed by Syrian government allies Russia and Iran, and Turkey, which has supported the rebels, two months ago in the Kazakh capital, Astana.

With a comfortable lead in opinion polls, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has left the stage for a quiet three-week summer holiday shrouded in secrecy - even though just two months remain before the election.

But her mid-campaign vacation - which local media say she will spend at the opera and in the Italian Alps - is less a reflection of her confidence she will win a fourth term or a natural human desire to recharge the batteries, and more a shrewd strategy to minimize the chances of any news that could swing the polls.

The point is to tranquilize the electorate and signal to voters that she is above the political fray - and her timing is spot on, just when most Germans will taking a large portion of their six weeks' annual leave.

Ankara has withdrawn a request which asked Berlin for information on nearly 700 German firms suspected of backing terrorism, a German interior ministry spokesman said. Turkey said the request was submitted due to a "communications problem."

Turkey's interior minister told his German counterpart during a Monday telephone call that Ankara's submission of the list in May, via Interpol, had stemmed from a "communications problem," German Interior Ministry spokesman Tobias Plate said.

"(The interior minister) underscored that there were no investigations against German firms by Turkish authorities in Turkey or in Germany," Plate said, as quoted by Reuters.

Reports on the "black list" emerged last week. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan dismissed those reports.

"I strongly condemn Germany's statements," Erdogan said in Istanbul on Friday.

"There is no investigation about any German company, it's all lies. German friends, I want to remind the whole world, you cannot besmear Turkey. You can never scare us with such things," Erdogan said, calling on Germany to "pull itself together."

It comes amid increased tensions between Berlin and Ankara, after Turkey jailed German human rights activist Peter Steudtner on Thursday.

"The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses." Malcolm X

Seven hundred and nineteen words is what it takes for an experienced journalist at The Atlantic to earn his comeuppance hating Donald Trump, and fueling the anti-Putin narrative. When a second meeting between the two world leaders at the G20 comes out, the mainstream "fake news" outlets turn tabloid embellishing a non-event. Since CNN was proven to be running game for ratings, the creative floodgates seem to have opened for the rest of corporate controlled media.

The Atlantic piece in question, written by Trump hater David A. Graham, tells us the story of how Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin met a second time after a dinner for G20 notables. Graham admits from the start, "it's not known what they discussed", but the lack of facts does not avert wondering propaganda evangelism from The Atlantic. The magazine led by the super Zionist and ultra-lefty, Jeffrey Goldberg the Obama doctrine preacher. History will remember Goldberg for his New Yorker piece entitled "The Great Terror", which argued of the threat posed to America by Saddam Hussein, and which assisted (as other narratives did) the Bush White House in engaging in regime change there. I'll leave off on my expectations and anticipations for when the chickens might come home to roost on Goldberg and The Atlantic here. Suffice it to say The Atlantic does not have "the truth" in it. Now on to the Trump-Putin secret meeting of supervillains. Let me quote Graham once again here:

"When President Trump's meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin went for more than two hours, well past the scheduled half-hour, it was a major news event. But it turns out that wasn't even the end of the conversation between the two men."